Ethics in Practice

World Hunger and International Justice

prevented and reduced by longterm development strategies that protect and promote entitlements and valuable capabilities. In the next section, we will return to the hunger-fighting role of national development strategies and international development. At this juncture, the crucial point is that direct food delivery is only one means, and often not the best means, for fighting world hunger. The capabilities approach helpfully interprets and underscores that point when it insists that public action can and should employ an array of complementary strategies to achieve the end of nutritional wellbeing for all.

Food as a means to other components of

well-being

The capabilities approach helps widen our vision to see that the food that hungry people command and consume can accomplish much more than to give them nutritional well-being. Nutritional well-being is only one element in human well-being; the overcoming of transitory or chronic hunger also enables people and their governments to protect and promote other ingredients of well-being. Being adequately nourished, for instance, contributes to healthy functioning that is both good in itself and indispensable to the ability to avoid premature death and fight off or recover from disease. Having nutritional well-being and good health, in turn, is crucial to acquiring and exercising other valuable capabilities such as being able to learn, think, deliberate, and choose as well as to be a good pupil, friend, householder, parent, worker, or citizen.

Because adequate food and food entitlements can have so many beneficial consequences in people's lives, creative development programs and projects find ways in which people can link food distribution/ acquirement to other valuable activities. Pregnant and lactating women (and their infants) acquire food supplements in health clinics, for nutritional deficiencies affect fetal and infant development. Schoolchildren eat free or subsidized lunches at school, for hungry children don't learn as well and certain nutritional deficiencies result in visual and cognitive impairment. 32

Nutritional well-being, then, is both constitutive of and a means to human well-being and personal development. And human development is the ultimate purpose of societal development. Hence, a more ample perspective on world hunger must include socioeconomic development as part of the cure. Just as the right kind of development is a large part of the answer to the various problems of population, so it is crucial to resolving the diverse problems of world hunger. 33

In the capabilities approach to international development, the linkage between hunger alleviation and development is spelled out in the language of valuable capabilities and functionings. In this approach, a society's development is conceived as a process of change that protects, restores, strengthens, and expands people's valued and valuable capabilities:14 Being able to be well-nourished and other nutrition-related capabilities are among the most important capabilities. Hence, a society striving to be developed will search for, establish, and maintain institutions and policies that attack and try to eradicate all forms of hunger and the poverty that causes hunger.35 Even emergency measures to prevent, relieve, or extirpate famine must not undermine, and, if possible, should contribute to, longterm strategies that "may be used to reduce or eliminate failures of basic capabilities" (HPA, p. 16). Economic, political and other institutions, such as schools and the family, must be modified and development strategies elected in the light of the effect such changes will have on what all persons will be able to do and be.

From the Ethics of Aid to an Ethics for Development

Finally, the ethics of famine relief should be incorporated into an ethics for development. International development ethics evaluates the basic goals and appropriate strategies for morally desirable social change. No longer fixated on the stark options of earlier debates - food aid versus no food aid, aid as duty versus aid as charity - it asks instead what kind of aid is morally defensible and, even more fund amen-

tally, what sort of national and international development aid should foster.

As early as the mid-fifties, development economists had been examining the developmental impact of different kinds of food aid and trying to design famine relief that would contribute to rather than undermine longterm development goals. 36 Yet in the seventies, philosophers and others, such as Garrett Hardin, failed to refer to the nuanced debate that had been going on for more than twenty years. Furthermore, as one expert on food aid remarks, "many of them did not feel it important to become more than superficially familiar with the technical or institutional aspects of food production, distribution, or policy.,,37 As happens all too often, the owl of Minerva - Hegel's image for the philosopher - "spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk" and comes on the scene too late to give "instruction as to what the world ought to be. ,,38

Moreover, when philosophers did try to analyze development, they usually emphasized development aid that rich countries provided to poor countries, rather than the development goals that poor countries set and pursued for themselves. By the mid-eighties, however, ethicists became increasingly aware that they couldn't talk about morally justified or unjustified development aid from the outside without first talking about the recipient nation's own development philosophies, goals, strategies, leadership, and wil1. 39 One marked advantage of the capabilities ethic is that it puts its highest priority on a nation's intellectual and institutional capability for self-development without denying the role of international theoretical and practical help (see HPA, p. 273; and "Goods and People").

With respect to morally defensible "development paths," a new discipline - international development ethics - has emerged. 40 Development ethicists ask several related questions. What should count as development? Which should be the most fundamental principles to inform a country's choice of development goals and strategies? What moral issues emerge in development policymaking and practice? How should the burdens and benefits of good development be distributed? What role - if any -

Hunger, Capacity, and Development

should more affluent societies and individuals play in the self-development of those less well off? What are the most serious national and international impediments to good development? Who should decide these questions and by what methods? To what extent, if any, do moral skepticism, political realism, and moral relativism pose a challenge to this boundarycrossing ethical inquiry?

This new discipline is being practiced in ways that sharply distinguish it from the earlier ethics of famine relief. First, development ethics is international in the triple sense that ethicists from diverse societies are trying to forge an international consensus about solutions to global problems. It has become evident that policy analysts and ethicists - whether from "developing" countries or "developed" countries - should not simply accept the operative or professed values implicit in a particular country's established development path. Rather, both cultural insiders and outsiders41 should engage in an ongoing and critical dialogue that includes explicit ethical analysis, assessment, and construction with respect to universal development ends and generally appropriate means of national, regional, and planetary change. Rather than being predominantly if not exclusively the work of white North American males, as was the case in the initial ethics of famine relief, international development ethics is an inquiry that includes participants from a variety of nations, groups, and moral traditions seeking an international consensus about problems of international scope. 42

Secondly, development ethics is interdisciplinary rather than exclusively philosophical. It eschews abstract ethical reflection and relates values to relevant facts in a variety of ways. Development ethicists, as we have seen in Dreze and Sen's work on hunger, evaluate (i) the normative assumptions of different development models, (ii) the empirical categories employed to interpret, explain, and forecast the facts, and (iii) development programs, strategies, and institutions.43

Finally, development ethics straddles the theory / practice distinction. Its practitioners include, as well as engage in dialogue with, policymakers and development activists. Instead of

World Hunger and International Justice

conducting a merely academic exercise, development theorists and development practitioners together assess the moral costs and benefits of current development policies, programs, and projects, and articulate alternative development visions. 44

Famine, food aid, and the ethics of famine relief remain - as they were in the mid-seventies - pressing personal, national, and international challenges. Philosophers can playa role in meeting these challenges and thereby reducing world hunger. This goal is best achieved, however, when the questions of world hunger and moral obligation are reframed and widened. Since the best longterm cure for hunger is national and international development, we must put emergency food aid in a developmental perspective and incorporate an ethics of famine relief into an international development ethics. To avoid the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is not to eschew abstractions but to place them in their proper relations to each other and to the concrete world of facts and values.

Notes

lowe thanks to my colleagues at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy and the School of Public Affairs for illuminating discussions of these issues. Will Aiken, Arthur Evenchik, Hugh LaFollette, and James W. Nickel made valuable comments on earlier versions of the essay. I gratefully acknowledge support for this research from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Grant no. RO- 22709-94. The views expressed are mine and not necessarily those of NEH.

1William Aiken and Hugh LaFollette (eds.), World Hunger and Moral Obligation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977). Hereafter I cite this volume as WHo

2Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 200.

3John Rawls, A Theory ofJustice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).

4Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality,"

Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972): 229-43. Singer's initial essay, reproduced with a new "Postscript" in WH, was written in 1971 and first appeared in Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1972, the initial year of publication of what was to

become the premier philosophical journal in applied ethics.

5Peter Singer, "Reconsidering the Famine Relief Argument," in Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue (eds.), Food Poli(y: The Responsibility of the United States in the Life and Death Choices

(New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 36.

6New York Times Magazine, July 7, 1974, 17-20.

7"The Need for Recovery of Philosophy," in Richard J. Bernstein (ed.), John Dewey: On Experience, Nature and Freedom (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), p. 67.

8A 1995 study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes shows that 80 percent of those polled agreed that "the United States should be willing to share at least a small portion of its wealth with those in the world who are in great need." This belief does not seem to stem solely from a view of national interest. For 67 percent agreed that "as one of the world's rich nations, the United States has a moral responsibility toward poor nations to help them develop economically and improve their people's lives" and 77 percent rejected the idea that the US should give aid only when it serves the national interest. Although 87 percent believe that waste and corruption is rife in foreign aid programs, 55 percent said they would be willing to pay more taxes for foreign aid if they knew that "most foreign aid was going to the poor people who really need it rather than to wasteful bureaucracies and corrupt governments." Steven Kull, "Americans and Foreign Aid: A Study of American Public Attitudes," Program of International Policy Attitudes, Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, University of Maryland, 1,4,6.

9See, for example, Catherine W. Wilson, "On Some Alleged Limitations to Moral Endeavor,"

Journal of Philosophy 90 (1993), 275-89. It is beyond the scope of this essay to consider the best way to think about our general duty to assist others and our particular duty to aid the foreign needy.

lO lowe the idea of perceiving or discerning "ethical salience" to Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle '.I Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 28-44. See also Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), especially chapters 2, 5.

11For a discussion of how ethical principles constrain what counts as relevant and irrelevant factual information, see Amartya Sen, "Well-

World Hunger and International Justice

concept of entitlement to include nonlegal primarily household - rules, but that Sen needs to go further in recognizing the ways in which "socially approved moral rules" may be extralegal and even anti-legal. See Charles Gore, "Entitlement Relations and 'Unruly' Social Practices: A Comment on the Work of Amartya Sen," Journal oj Development Economics 29

(1993): 429-60.

24Amartya Sen, "Food Entitlements and Economic Chains," in Hunger in History, p. 377.

25Amartya Sen, "Food, Economics and Entitlements," in The Political Economy oj Hunger,

Vol. I, Entitlement and Well-Being, p. 43.

26Sen, "The Food Problem," 447-51. Cf. HPA, 24-5; and "Food, Economics, and Entitle-

ments," 35-6.

27Amartya Sen, "The Food Problem," p. 450. Cf. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); and "Goods and People."

28For a clarification and defense of these claims, see Sen and Nussbaum's writings and my analysis and evaluations of them in the ssays referred to in n. 14.

29Sen, Inequality Reexamined, p. 110.

30For a more detailed and technical discussion of these issues by nutritionists who are sympathetic with the capabilities approach, see S. R. Osmani (ed.), Nutrition and Poverty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). See also Paul Streeten, Thinking about Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

31A new strain of "miracle" rice, which promises enormous productivity gains, will be hybridized with local rice varieties in order to make it acceptable to regional tastes in different parts of the world.

32Cf. John Osgood Field and Mitchel B. Waller-

stein, "Beyond Humanitarianism: A Developmental Perspective on American Food Aid," in

Food Policy, pp. 234-58.

33See Amartya Sen, "Population: Delusion and Reality," New York Review ojBooks 61 (September 22, 1994): 62-71; and "Goods and People."

34See Amartya Sen, "Goods and People"; "Development: Which Way Now?" in Resources, Values and Development (Oxford: Blackwell; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) pp. 485-508; "The Concept of Development," in Hollis Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan (eds.),

Handbook ojDevelopment Economics, vol. I (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1988), pp. 9-26; "Development as Capability Expansion," in Griffin

and Knight (eds.), Human Development and the

International Development Strategy for the 1990s, pp. 41-58; Crocker, "Functioning and Capability," 584-8. See also United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report

1994 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 13: "The purpose of development is to create an environment in which all people can expand their capabilities, and opportunities can be enlarged for both present and future generations."

35For a detailed examination of institutions and policies - both national and international - that have proved successful in alleviating hunger and reducing poverty, see HPA, and Streeten,

Thinking about Development.

36For a good account, with full references, of controversies in the fifties, sixties, and seventies concerning US food aid and development policy, see Anne O. Krueger, Constantine Michalopoulos, and Vernon W. Ruttan, Aid and Development (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Vernon W. Ruttan (ed.), Why Food Aid? (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), especially pp. 37129.

37Ruttan (ed.), Why Food Aid?, p. 66.

38Georg W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy olRight, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 12-13.

39See especially, Nigel Dower, World Poverty: Challenge and Response (York, UK: Ebor Press, 1983); Onora O'Neill, Faces olHunger: An Essay

on Poverzy, Justice, and Development (London: Allen Unwin, 1986); Jerome M. Segal, "What is Development?" Working Paper, DN-I (College Park, MD: Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, October 1986).

40For philosophical accounts of development ethics, see David A. Crocker, "Toward Development Ethics," World Development 19/5 (1991): 457-83; and "Development Ethics and Development Theory-Practice," Discussion Paper CBPE 93-2 (College Station: Center for Biotechnology Policy and Ethics, Texas A&M University, 1993); and Nigel Dower, "What is Development?

-A Philosopher's Answer," Centre for Development Studies Occasional Paper Series, 3 (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1988).

41David A. Crocker, "Insiders and Outsiders in International Development Ethics," Ethics and International Affairs 5 (1991), 149-73.

42See Godfrey Gunatilleke, Neelen Tiruchelvam, and Radhika Coomaraswamy (eds.), Ethical Di-

lemmas of Development in Asia (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988); K warne Gyekye, The

Unexamined Life: Philosophy and the African Experience (Legon: Ghana Universities Press, 1988); Martha Nussbaum, "Aristotelian Social Democracy," in R. Bruce Douglass, Gerald R. Mara, and Henry S. Richardson (eds.), Liberalism and the Good (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 203-52; and Luis Camacho,

Ciencia y tecnologia en el subdesarrollo (Cirtago: Editorial Tecnol6gica de Costa Rica, 1993).

43Since the early sixties, Denis Goulet has been addressing the ethical and value dimensions of development theory and practice. His new book,

Development Ethics: A Guide to Theory and Practice (New York: Apex Books, 1995), treats development ethics from the perspective of a policy analyst and activist. Economist Paul Streeten, an architect of the basic human-needs strategy and

Hunger, Capacity, and Development

currently a consultant with UNDP, has persistently addressed ethical issues in his work; see, for example, Strategies for Human Development: Global Poverty and Unemployment (Copenhagen: Handelshjskolens Forlag, 1994).

44An early anticipation of an integrated approach to world hunger is Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue (eds.), Food Policy: The Responsibility ofthe United States in the Life and Death Choices (New York: Free Press, 1977). This anthology, which appeared in the same year as WH, shared WH's deficiencies with respect to minority and international participation. Food Policy's contributors, however, included policy analysts and policymakers as well as a variety of academics. Moreover, the volume displayed an excellent balance - as a whole and in several individual essays - of moral, empirical, institutional, political, and policy analysis.

Thomas W. Pogge

Article 25: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.

Article 28: Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

1Introduction: Radical Inequality and Our Responsibility

One great challenge to any morally sensItIve person today is the extent and severity of global poverty. Among six billion human beings, 790 million lack adequate nutrition, one billion lack access to safe water, 2.4 billion lack basic sanitation (UNDP, 2000, p. 30); more than 880 million lack access to basic health services (UNDP, 1999, p. 22); one billion are without adequate shelter and two billion without electricity (UNDP, 1998, p. 49). 250 million children between 5 and 14 do wage work outside their household ~ often under harsh or cruel conditions ~ as soldiers, prostitutes, or domestic servants, or in agriculture, construction, textile or carpet production (World Bank, 2000, p. 62). About one billion adults are illiterate (UNDP,

2000, p. 30). Roughly one third of all human deaths, some 50,000 daily, are due to povertyrelated causes and thus avoidable insofar as poverty is avoidable (UNICEF, 1999; WHO 2000). If the US had its proportional share of these deaths, poverty would kill some 820,000 of its citizens a year ~ more each month than were killed during the entire Vietnam War.

There are two ways of conceiving global poverty as a moral challenge to us: We may be failing to fulfill our positive duty to help persons in acute distress. And we may be failing to fulfill our more stringent negative duty not to uphold injustice, not to contribute to or profit from the unjust impoverishment of others.

These two views differ in important ways. The positive formulation is easier to substantiate. It need be shown only that they are very badly off, that we are very much better off, and that we could relieve some of their suffering without becoming badly-off ourselves. But this ease comes at a price: Some who accept the positive formulation think of the moral reasons it provides as weak and discretionary and thus do not feel obligated to promote worthy causes, especially costly ones. Many feel entitled, at least, to support good causes of their choice ~ their church or alma mater, cancer research or the environment ~ rather than putting themselves out for total strangers half a world away, with whom they share no bond of community or culture. It is of some importance, therefore, to

investigate whether existing global poverty involves our violating a negative duty. This is important for us, if we want to lead a moral life, and important also for the poor, because it will make a great difference to them whether we affluent do or do not see global poverty as an injustice we help maintain.

Some believe that the mere fact of radical inequality shows a violation of negative duty. Radical inequality may be defined as involving five elements (extending Nagel, 1977):

The worse-off are very badly off in absolute terms.

2 They are also very badly off in relative terms - very much worse off than many others.

3The inequality is impervious: It is difficult or impossible for the worse-off substantially to improve their lot; and most of the betteroff never experience life at the bottom for even a few months and have no vivid idea of what it is like to live in that way.

4The inequality is pervasive: It concerns not merely some aspects of life, such as the climate or access to natural beauty or high culture, but most aspects or all.

5The inequality is avoidable: The better-off can improve the circumstances of the worseoff without becoming badly off themselves.

The phenomenon of global poverty clearly exemplifies radical inequality as defined. But I doubt that these five conditions suffice to invoke more than a merely positive duty. And I suspect most citizens of the developed west would also find them insufficient. They might appeal to the following parallel: Suppose we discovered people on Venus who are very badly off, and suppose we could help them at little cost to ourselves. If we did nothing, we would surely violate a positive duty of beneficence. But we would not be violating a negative duty of justice, because we would not be contributing to the perpetuation of their misery.

This point could be further disputed. But let me here accept the Venus argument and examine what further conditions must be satisfied for radical inequality to manifest an injustice that involves violation of a negative duty by the better-off. I see three plausible approaches to

Eradicating Systemic Poverty

this question, invoking three different grounds of injustice: the effects of shared institutions, the uncompensated exclusion from the use of natural resources, and the effects of a common and violent history. These approaches exemplify distinct and competing political philosophies. We need nevertheless not decide among them here if, as I will argue, the following two theses are true. First, all three approaches classify the existing radical inequality as unjust and its coercive maintenance as a violation of negative duty.

Second, all three approaches can agree on the same feasible reform of the status quo as a major step toward justice. If these two theses can be supported, then it may be possible to gather adherents of the dominant strands of western normative political thought into a coalition focused on eradicating global poverty through the introduction of a Global Resources Dividend or GRD.

2Three Grounds of Injustice

2.1The effects ofshared institutions

The first approach (suggested in O'Neill, 1985; Nagel, 1977; and Pogge, 1989, §24) puts forward three additional conditions:

6There is a shared institutional order that is shaped by the better-off and imposed on the worse-off.

7This institutional order is implicated in the reproduction of radical inequality in that there is a feasible institutional alternative under which so severe and extensive poverty would not persist.

8The radical inequality cannot be traced to extra-social factors (such as genetic handicaps or natural disasters) which, as such, affect different human beings differentially.

Present radical global inequality meets Condition 6 in that the global poor live within a worldwide states system based on internationally recognized territorial domains, interconnected through a global network of market trade and diplomacy. The presence and relevance of shared institutions is shown by how

World Hunger and International Justice

dramatically we affect the circumstances of the global poor through investments, loans, trade, bribes, military aid, sex tourism, culture exports, and much else. Their very survival often crucially depends on our consumption choices, which may determine the price of their foodstuffs and their opportunities to find work. In sharp contrast to the Venus case, we are causally deeply involved in their misery. This does not mean that we should hold ourselves responsible for the remoter effects of our economic decisions. These effects reverberate around the world and interact with the effects of countless other such decisions and thus cannot be traced, let alone predicted. Nor need we draw the dubious and utopian conclusion that global interdependence must be undone by isolating states or groups of states from one another. But we must be concerned with how the rules structuring international interactions foreseeably affect the incidence of extreme poverty. The developed countries, thanks to their vastly superior military and economic strength, control these rules and therefore share responsibility for their foreseeable effects.

Condition 7 involves tracing the poverty of individuals in an explanatory way to the structure of social institutions. This exercise is familiar in regard to national institutions, whose explanatory importance has been powerfully illustrated by domestic regime changes in China, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. In regard to the global economic order, the exercise is unfamiliar and shunned even by economists. This is due in part, no doubt, to powerful resistance against seeing oneself as connected to the unimaginable deprivations suffered by the global poor. This resistance biases us against data, arguments, and researchers liable to upset our preferred world view and thus biases the competition for professional success against anyone exploring the wider causal context of global poverty. This bias is reinforced by our cognitive tendency to overlook the causal significance of stable background factors (e.g., the role of atmospheric oxygen in the outbreak of a fire), as our attention is naturally drawn to geographically or temporally variable factors. Looking at the incidence of poverty worldwide, we are struck

by dramatic local changes and international variations, which point to local explanatory factors. The heavy focus on such local factors then encourages the illusion, succumbed to by Rawls (1999, p. 108), for example, that they completely explain global poverty.

This illusion conceals how profoundly local factors and their effects are influenced by the existing global order. Yes, a culture of corruption pervades the political system and the economy of many developing countries. But is this culture unrelated to the fact that most affluent countries have, until quite recently, allowed their firms to bribe foreign officials and even made such bribes tax-deductible? 1 - Yes, developing countries have shown themselves prone to oppressive government and to horrific wars and civil wars. But is the frequency of such brutality unrelated to the international arms trade, and unrelated to international rules that entitle anyone holding effective power in such a country to borrow in its name and to sell ownership rights in its natural resources (Wantchekon, 1999)? - Yes, the world is diverse, and poverty is declining in some countries and worsening in others. But the larger pattern is quite stable, reaching far back into the colonial era: "The income gap between the fifth of the world's people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 74 to I in 1997, up from 60 to I in 1990 and 30 to I in 1960. [Earlier] the income gap between the top and bottom countries increased from 3 to I in 1820 to 7 to I in 1870 to 11 to I in 1913" (UNDP, 1999, p. 3). The affluent countries have been using their power to shape the rules of the world economy according to their own interests and thereby have deprived the poorest populations of a fair share of global economic growth (Pogge, 2001) - quite avoidably so, as the GRD proposal shows.

Global poverty meets Condition 8 insofar as the global poor, if only they had been born into different social circumstances, would be just as able and likely to lead healthy, happy, and productive lives as the rest of us. The root cause of their suffering is their abysmal social starting position which does not give them much of a chance to become anything but poor, vulnerable, and dependent - unable to give their chil-

dren a better start than they had had themselves.

It is because the three additional conditions are met that existing global poverty has, according to the first approach, the special moral urgency we associate with negative duties, why we should take it much more seriously than otherwise similar suffering on Venus. The reason is that the citizens and governments of the affluent countries - whether intentionally or not - are imposing a global institutional order that foreseeably and avoidably reproduces severe and widespread poverty. The worse-off are not merely poor and often starving, but are being impoverished and starved under our shared institutional arrangements, which inescapably shape their lives.

The first approach can be presented in a consequentialist guise, as in Bentham, or in a contractualist guise, as in Rawls or Habermas. In both cases, the central thought is that social institutions are to be assessed in a forwardlooking way, by reference to their effects. In the present international order, billions are born into social starting positions that give them extremely low prospects for a fulfilling life. Their misery could be justified only if there were no institutional alternative under which such massive misery would be avoided. If, as the GRD proposal shows, there is such an alternative, then we must ascribe this misery to the existing global order and therefore ultimately to ourselves. As, remarkably, Charles Darwin wrote in reference to his native Britain: "If the misery of our poor be caused not by laws of nature, but by our own institutions, great is our sin" (quoted in Gould, 1991, p. 19).

2.2Uncompensated Exclusion from the Use of Natural Resources

The second approach adds (in place of Conditions 6-8) only one condition to the five of radical inequality:

9The better-off enjoy significant advantages in the use of a single natural resource base from whose benefits the worse-off are largely, and without compensation, excluded.

Eradicating Systemic Poverty

Currently, appropriation of wealth from our planet is highly uneven. Affluent people use vastly more of the world's resources, and they do so unilaterally, without giving any compensation to the global poor for their disproportionate consumption. Yes, the affluent often pay for the resources they use, such as imported crude oil. But these payments go to other affluent people, such as the Saudi family or the Nigerian kleptocracy, with very little, if anything, trickling down to the global poor. So the question remains: What entitles a global elite to use up the world's natural resources on mutually agreeable terms while leaving the global poor emptyhanded?

Defenders of capitalist institutions have developed conceptions of justice that support rights to unilateral appropriation of disproportionate shares of resources while accepting that all inhabitants of the earth ultimately have equal claims to its resources. These conceptions are based on the thought that such rights are justified if all are better off with them than anyone would be if appropriation were limited to proportional shares.

This pattern of justification is exemplified with particular clarity in John Locke (cf. also Nozick, 1974, ch. 4). Locke is assuming that, in a state of nature without money, persons are subject to the moral constraint that their unilateral appropriations must always leave "enough, and as good" for others, that is, must be confined to a proportional share (Locke, 1689, §27 §33). This so-called Lockean Proviso may however be lifted with universal consent (ibid., §36). Locke subjects such a lifting to a second-order proviso, which requires that the rules of human coexistence may be changed only if all can rationally consent to the alteration, that is, only if everyone will be better offunder the new rules than anyone would be under the old. And he claims that the lifting of the enough-and-as-good constraint through the general acceptance of money does satisfy this second-order proviso: A day laborer in England feeds, lodges, and is clad better than a king of a large fruitful territory in the Americas (ibid., §41 §37).

It is hard to believe that Locke's claim was true in his time. In any case, it is surely false on the global plane today. Billions are born into a