Response to my Critics

In From Global Poverty to Global Equality (hereafter GPGE), I engage in a philosophical exploration of the moral desirability and the practical feasibility of implementing global principles of poverty relief and egalitarian distributive justice. In this exploration, GPGE provides novel ways to challenge three common dichotomies in political theory and practice. They concern the tensions between approaches to global justice based on negative and on positive duties, between associativist and strictly universal humanist perspectives on the scope of distributive requirements, and between “realistic” but normatively unambitious and normatively ambitious but highly “idealistic” moral outlooks. GPGE argues that the second component of each of these contrasts can be given a powerful rendering, and that we should in fact resist the alleged dilemmas. We can and should affirm both positive and negative duties, combine humanist and associativist considerations, and aim high with our principles while thinking lucidly about the feasibility of their practical implementation. Regarding the first point, GPGE develops an account of socioeconomic human rights and egalitarian distribution in which our responsibilities have a global scope, and are based on positive duties to support the achievement of a decent and flourishing life by all human beings, not only on negative duties not to deprive them of access to such a life. Regarding the second point, GPGE defends the plausibility of humanist global principles, and explores how their demands relate to associative considerations in distributive justice. The relation is shown to be complicated, but not always one of mutual exclusion. Regarding the third point, it is common in political theory and practice to challenge ambitious proposals by saying that although their fulfillment may be desirable, it is not really feasible. However, there has been close to no conceptual exploration of what feasibility is, and very little substantive inquiry into why and how it matters for thinking about justice. GPGE seeks to fill these gaps. It proposes one of the only available systematic analyses of the concept of feasibility, and one of the first systematic applications of it to the pursuit of the fulfillment of human rights and global equality. GPGE provides an exploration, not a complete theory of global justice. The contributions to this symposium by Patti Lenard, Robert Sparling, Christine Straehle, and Colin Macleod, for which I am very thankful, show that the exploration should be taken further. A significant challenge that any ambitious conception of global justice faces is that what it requires may be at odds with what some people are currently willing to do. A salient example of this difficulty concerns people’s strong tendency to give great weight to what they see as their responsibility to those who are “near and dear” to them, to those with whom they share special relationships (of love, friendship, family, and, more controversially, co-nationality). Patti Lenard argues that GPGE fails to properly address this challenge in two respects. The first charge is that GPGE’s “account of the motivational mechanisms that serve to secure aid to the global poor does not account for a key element of human moral psychology and it is that what we are willing to do for others, even as a matter of justice, is deeply connected with our sense of how much doing so will cost … [I]t may be that people are indeed willing to ‘sacrifice’ some of their well-being in the name of improving the others’ well-being, but they may not be willing to contribute in ways that are ‘too much’.” I find this charge puzzling because GPGE explicitly mentions, at several points, that costs to duty-bearers, including regarding the limitation of what they …