alexander brown - are there any global egalitarian rights

Are There Any Global Egalitarian Rights?

Alexander Brown

Published online: 21 March 2008# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract This article considers whether or not there are any global egalitarian rightsthrough a critical examination of the political philosophy of Ronald Dworkin.Although Dworkin maintains that equal concern is the special and indispensablevirtue of sovereigns and the hallmark of a fraternal political community, it is far fromobvious whether the demands of equality stop at state borders. While some scholarsin the field—most notably Thomas Pogge—posit the existence of negative rights inrelation to social and economic inequalities at the global level, here I try to defendthe existence of positive global egalitarian rights by appealing to Dworkin’s own twoprinciples of ethical individualism. I also set out the framework for a version of whatI call global luck egalitarianism based on Dworkin’s equality of resources and try torespond to David Miller’s charge that comparative principles of justice do not applyat the global level.

Keywords Dworkin . Global Justice . Egalitarianism . Rights

Introduction

The aim of Ronald Dworkin’s powerful work on liberal equality over the past threedecades has been to demonstrate how abstract rights to equal concern and respectcan be interpreted in such a way as to imply assistance for unlucky members of thepolitical community but at the same time a healthy degree of freedom andresponsibility for citizens generally. Whilst equal concern and respect may not be

Hum Rights Rev (2008) 9:435–464DOI 10.1007/s12142-008-0063-5

A. Brown (*)Department of Political Science, University College London, 29/30 Tavistock Square,London WC1H 9QU, UKe-mail: [email protected]

something that people owe to each other in their personal lives, it is something thatsovereigns owe to their citizens. It is, in that sense, the sovereign virtue.1 Many partsof Dworkin’s theory have been subject to critical scrutiny—not least his influentialdistinction between luck and choice.2 However, I want to focus on a different part ofhis argument; one that has implications for the scope of egalitarian rights.

During the same period of time in which Dworkin has been perfecting his theoryof liberal equality for life within sovereign states, there has been increasing supportamong a number of political philosophers for the view that when makingcomparisons of people’s lives for the purposes of delivering social and economicjustice that comparison should be made between people in general rather thanbetween the members of narrow political jurisdictions such as states.3 Thus far,Dworkin has been reluctant to make a similar move. This can be explained in termsof his understanding of equality as a bounded value. For Dworkin, it is dependent onthe fact that governments claim a monopoly on the exercise of coercive power overtheir citizens that such persons can reasonably claim a right to equal concern andrespect. What is more, it is only within true political communities that citizens havea responsibility to treat each other as equals, and this responsibility does not extendto the members of other political communities. In so far as there are no internationalassociations that share these characteristics of sovereign power and genuinecommunity (or fraternity), there are no such things as global rights to equal concernand respect. It seems to me, however, that there is more to be said on the matter thanthis initial analysis suggests, as the aforementioned reasons for thinking that thereare no such things as global egalitarian rights are far from conclusive. Two keyaspects of my critique will be that in limiting the demands of egalitarian justice tocertain kinds of political community Dworkin (1) makes controversial assumptionsabout the best interpretation of the two principles of ethical individualism uponwhich these demands are based and (2) fails to take sufficiently seriously the pointthat membership within political communities is itself a matter of brute luck.

The rest of the article is structured as follows. In the next section, I introduceDworkin’s abstract egalitarian rights. I then detail his grounds for thinking that thescope of these rights is domestic as opposed to global and outline three possiblereplies. The first is to insist that the world currently does contain an association withthe requisite coercive power and sense of fraternity to get global rights to equalconcern and respect off the ground. I shall contend that the first strategy is not veryhopeful because even the leading candidate (the United Nations) fails to satisfy theconditions of sovereignty and fraternity defended by Dworkin. I then turn to a secondreply which is to deny that sovereignty and fraternity are necessary conditions for the

1 Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).2 For a critique of Dworkin’s way of making the choice/luck cut, see G. A. Cohen, ‘On the Currency ofEgalitarian Justice’, Ethics, 99 (1989): 906−944; ‘Expensive Tastes Rides Again’, in J. Burley (ed.)Dworkin and His Critics (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004). Dworkin’s replies to Cohen can be found inhis Sovereign Virtue, ch. 7 and ‘Ronald Dworkin Replies’ also published in Dworkin and His Critics.3 See Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1979), part III; Henry Shue, ‘The Burdens of Justice’, Journal of Philosophy, 80 (1983): 600−608;Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), ch. 6; Brian Barry ‘Humanityand Justice in Global Perspective’ in his Liberty and Justice: Essays in Political Theory Volume 2 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 195−203.

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existence of such rights given the nature and degree of economic and social interactionbetween states. Here, I critically assess the work of John Rawls, Charles Beitz andThomas Pogge. I will argue that these approaches to international justice, though notentirely flawed, do fall short of showing adequate concern for the fate of the globallydisadvantaged. A third reply posits the existence of global rights to equal concern andrespect that are positive in nature and which transcend the existence of manmadeartifices, fraternal ties and economic interdependence. I try to defend these rights bydrawing on a modified interpretation of Dworkin’s own two principles of ethicalindividualism (or human dignity) and a more holistic interpretation of the demands ofluck neutralisation. Finally, I tentatively set out some principles of internationaldistributive justice that might flow from these rights.

Dworkin’s Abstract Egalitarian Rights

Few political philosophers nowadays seem able to make do without talk of rights.Dworkin is no exception. In his Taking Rights Seriously, he sets out to construct aliberal conception of equality, but does so by first stating the following abstractegalitarian right (which is actually two rights combined).

We might say that individuals have a right to equal concern and respect in thedesign and administration of the political institutions that govern them. This is ahighly abstract right. [...] The right to equal concern and respect [...] is moreabstract than the standard conceptions of equality that distinguish differentpolitical theories.’4

While the utilitarian, conservative or Marxist might also regard abstract rights toequal concern and respect as being central to his or her own view, Dworkin cleavesto the following liberal conception:

Government must treat those whom it governs with concern, that is, as humanbeings who are capable of suffering and frustration, and with respect, that is, ashuman beings who are capable of forming and acting on intelligent conceptionsof how their lives should be lived. Government must treat people not only withconcern and respect, but with equal concern and respect. It must not distributegoods or opportunities unequally on the ground that some citizens are entitledto more because they are worthy of more concern. It must not constrain libertyon the ground that one citizen’s conception of the good life of one group isnobler or superior to another’s.5

In order to asses this position it is imperative to recognise the distinction betweenclaiming that people possess abstract egalitarian rights against their own governmentand political community and claiming that people possess abstract egalitarian rightsagainst any government and political community around the world. This is adistinction between domestic and global egalitarian rights. Dworkin makes the first

4 Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1977), p. 180.5 Ibid., pp. 272−273.

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claim but not the second. To be sure, at the level of domestic politics, he contrastsuniversal with special rights, where this marks the difference between rights whichare held by all citizens within the political community and rights which are held onlyby one section of the community and perhaps even a single member.6 However, bydefinition, a citizen can claim these domestic rights only against his or her owngovernment and not against other governments. That being said, it is also possible totalk meaningfully of general and special global rights, where this reflects thedifference between rights which are held against particular actors on the world stage(due to historical actions on their part, for example) and rights which are held againstthe rest of the world generally.

As I have already mentioned, there are two main reasons why Dworkin believesthat abstract egalitarian rights have domestic rather than global scope. The first hasto do with political power, and it is to this reason that I now turn.

Political Power

The issue of power is briefly addressed in the introduction to Sovereign Virtue.

No government is legitimate that does not show equal concern for the fate of allthose over whom it claims dominion and from whom it claims allegiance.7

A political community that exercises dominion over its own citizens, and demandsfrom them allegiance and obedience to its laws, must take up an impartial, objectiveattitude toward them all, and each of its citizens must vote, and its officials mustenact laws and form governmental policies, with that responsibility in mind. Equalconcern, as I said, is the special and indispensable virtue of sovereigns.8

That a monopoly on the exercise of coercive power generates special rights on thepart of those who are subject to that power has been reiterated by other theoristsworking in the field of international justice. Michael Blake, for example, expressesthe thought by stating that ‘an impartial principle will give rise to distinct burdens ofjustification between individuals who share liability to the coercive power of thestate.’9 With great power comes special responsibility.

Now Dworkin does not say explicitly whether the existence of a unified sovereignpower provides a sufficient condition for the existence of egalitarian rights, but hisdiscussion of fraternity (to which I shall return) strongly suggests that it is only anecessary condition. In this way, sovereign power is merely part of what is needed tocomplete a set of sufficient conditions. That it is merely a necessary condition andnot a sufficient condition can be supported with the following example. Imagine aworld inhabited by two antagonistic nations, at odds with each other for centuries. Atpresent, one of these nations has the upper hand by virtue of its possession of greater

6 Ibid., p. 94n.1.7 Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, p. 1.8 Ibid., p. 6.9 Michael Blake, ‘Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 30(2001): 257−296, p. 264.

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fire power. It demands obedience from the other nation over a range of issuesincluding the distribution of resources in the world they share. Not surprisingly, thedominant group takes most of the available resources leaving only enough for theothers to live a very basic existence. However, suppose the fortunes of the twonations dramatically reverse one day when members of the less powerful groupstumble upon a novel and potentially devastating weapon which the other nation hasno way to develop. After only a short period of time, they begin to exert their newfound dominance and take resources from the other nation. Slowly but surely, theyreach the point of equality. At this juncture, some of their number believe that theyshould press home their advantage and take more. Others believe that they ought toshow restraint. What should they do? I think that Dworkin would find it hard toresist the conclusion that the newly dominant nation has no moral duty to showequal concern and respect to members of the subordinate nation. From the mere factthat they now find themselves in control of the resources, it does not follow that theyought to treat everybody as equals. Why not? It might be argued that the reason whythese two nations do not owe each other equal concern is because there is nofraternity between them. The dominant nation might claim to hold power, but itcannot reasonably claim to hold power under a fraternal ideal. So what is fraternityand why is it important?

Fraternity

Dworkin introduces the notion of fraternity in Law’s Empire in the context of anexamination of citizens’ obligations. Here, he sets out to challenge the commonassumption that political obligation requires consent on the part of citizens. Toundermine this assumption, he lights on the idea of associative obligations.Associative obligations are, put simply, obligations which people owe to each otherbecause they are associated in certain ways. Dworkin offers the examples ofobligations which arise among friends and lovers, families, unions and officecolleagues.10 The core characteristic shared by these examples is that ‘people haveobligations in virtue of being members of certain kinds of communities, even thoughthey have not chosen that status or role.’11 In this way, consent is not a necessarycondition of membership; people attract rather than assume associative obliga-tions.12 Dworkin maintains that there is no requirement of consent even in the caseof political communities. Indeed, he thinks that it is difficult to see how this could beotherwise, given the fact that generally speaking people are born into their particularpolitical communities, and the practical value of the choice to emigrate is oftenseverely limited.13 He also rejects the notion that membership must be based on‘emotional bonds that presuppose that each member of the group has personal

10 Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 196.11 Dworkin, ‘Ronald Dworkin Replies’, p. 376, emphasis added.12 Dworkin, Law’s Empire, pp. 196−197.13 Ibid., p. 207.


acquaintance of all others’.14 This opens up the possibility of large politicalcommunities with dispersed and heterogeneous populations.

Now, Dworkin does not suppose that every political community will involveassociative obligations which are rightly described as egalitarian. On the contrary, heinsists that one must be careful to distinguish between the various accidental genetic,geographical or historical conditions that lead peoples to become members of ‘bare’political communities from the conditions that are necessary to transform a barepolitical community into a ‘true’ political community, where true politicalcommunities involve fraternal obligations.15 Dworkin seems to think that a lack oftrue political community in the world of states provides a second barrier to theextension of principles of domestic distributive justice to the international sphere.

So what are fraternal obligations? According to Dworkin, to count as havingfraternal obligations ‘the members of a group must by and large hold certainattitudes about the responsibilities they owe one another’.16 They must ‘share ageneral and diffuse sense of members’ special rights and responsibilities from ortoward one another, a sense of what sort and level of sacrifice one may be expectedto make for another.’17 But not just any sense will do. Dworkin identifies fournecessary conditions for the existence of fraternal association. First, members of thepolitical community ‘must regard the groups’ obligations as special, holdingdistinctly within the group, rather than as general duties its members owe equallyto persons outside it.’18 Second, they must accept that the obligations are owed toeach member of the group rather than to the group as a collective entity.19 Third,‘members must see their responsibilities as flowing from a more general duty eachhas of concern for the well-being of others in the group.’20 (Note, when Dworkinsays this is ‘a more general duty’ it is still a special duty in the crucial sense that it isowed to comembers only.) Forth, they must suppose that the duty of concern is aduty of equal concern in the sense that no member’s life is more valuable than anyother member’s life.21

Although the members of a political community must hold certain attitudes aboutthe responsibilities they owe to each other for it to be considered a true politicalcommunity, it is unnecessary for these attitudes to be conscious or explicit.22

Dworkin argues that these attitudes should be seen as ‘an interpretive property’. Thismeans that it is enough that we can interpret their actions as though they had these

14 Ibid., p. 196.15 Ibid., pp. 196−198.16 Ibid., p. 199.17 Ibid.18 Ibid.19 Ibid. In contrast to communitarianism properly called, Dworkin argues that a community is not an agentor living thing with an ontological status and life of its own over and above the activities of its members.See Ronald Dworkin, ‘Liberal Community’, California Law Review, 77 (1989): 479−504, p. 494.20 Dworkin, Law’s Empire, p. 200, emphasis in original.21 Ibid., pp. 200−201.22 Ibid., p. 199.

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attitudes as opposed to assuming that the attitude is ‘a psychological property ofsome fixed number of the actual members’.23 What is much less clear, however, iswhether or not exhibiting the interpretive property must itself be true of some fixednumber of actual members. How many individual members of the community mustbe treating one another in ways that can be plausibly interpreted as fraternal for thatcommunity to be considered a true community? Despite this difficult question,however, it is reasonably clear that any deeply discriminatory or hierarchical societyis unlikely to satisfy the last condition of fraternity, to wit, equal concern.

Dworkin clarifies that if the attitude of equal concern does not pervade every levelof politics including the constitution, legislation, elections and law enforcement andacross many spheres of public life, the community cannot make a claim tolegitimacy under a fraternal ideal (regardless of whether or not other duties of justicedo or do not remain in play).24 In so far as the same condition holds for globalpolitics—the constitution of the UN, international law, foreign trade rules, the termsand conditions of humanitarian aid, for example—this provides an obviousstumbling block to interpreting current international relations under a fraternal ideal.It is often assumed that governments will recognise the interests of their own citizensas paramount, taking precedence over any concern they ought to show for themembers of other political communities. To the extent that it recognises the interestsof its own citizens as paramount, how can any government be reasonably interpretedas accepting that the duty of concern it has to other peoples is a duty of equalconcern?

Weighing the Prospects for Global Egalitarian Rights

So far, then, we have this much. Those who resist the idea of global egalitarianrights instinctively can point to the fact that sovereign power and true politicalcommunity are necessary preconditions of such rights. So, for example, if there isno such thing as a global sovereign which exercises a monopoly on coercivepower over a fraternal world political community, then members of poor countrieshave no right to expect a reduction in global inequalities of income and wealth. AsDworkin puts it,

We suppose that we have special interests in and obligations toward othermembers of our own nation. American address their political appeals, theirdemands, visions, and ideals, in the first instance to other Americans; Britons toother Britons; and so forth. We treat community as prior to justice and fairnessin the sense that questions of justice and fairness are regarded as questions ofwhat would be just or fair within a particular political group.25

The suggestion here is that values of justice and fairness are bounded values; thatwithout a global political group of the required kind, there can be no questions of

23 Ibid., p. 201.24 Ibid., pp. 213−214.25 Ibid., p. 208.


justice and fairness. What is more, the logic of the view seems to be that whilstsovereigns are not under any obligation to refrain from entering into such groupswith other countries—thereby attracting obligations toward other peoples—there isat the same time no obligation to strive toward such ties. There is nothing whichprecludes states from refusing to lift a finger to bring about a change in internationalrelations of the sort that is required for the existence of a global political community.In other words, sovereigns are free to avoid entanglement in obligation-generatingassociative relationships just as two friends might concentrate on the obligationsthey have to one another resolutely avoiding any new attachments with outsiders.

If this is Dworkin’s position, then he is by no means alone in holding it. The ideathat a special kind of community is required to duplicate domestic egalitarian rightsat the global level is shared by some other notable theorists in the field. DavidMiller, for example, argues in a somewhat similar vein to Dworkin that the only sortsof political associations which can support egalitarian institutions such asredistributive taxation and a welfare state are those which ‘involve a kind ofinstitutional reciprocity’, whereby ‘members contribute their labour and/or theirmoney to a common pool, which is then drawn upon by those with special needs orin particular circumstances such as old age’. Here, enforcement is possible onlybecause people generally acknowledge a responsibility to contribute to thecommunity ‘which is more than’ a responsibility to help people elsewhere.26 Millersubscribes to the view that there is no global community of the requisite sort intoday’s world.27

I think that the above critique of global egalitarian rights deserves to be takenseriously, but that it is by no means unanswerable. There are three strategies worthnoting. One is to try to ground global rights to equal concern and respect by diggingin one’s heals and insisting that there does exist among current political structuresand practices something like a global sovereign power and a global politicalcommunity with the hallmarks of fraternity. A second strategy is to ground globalrights to equal concern and respect in the existence of international social andeconomic interaction which, though not exactly like the ties that bind peopletogether within states, are sufficient to support the existence of global egalitarianrights which are negative in character (as in rights against being harmed by others).This is, of course, the strategy adopted by Thomas Pogge.28 A third strategy is toargue for the existence of global rights to equal concern and respect that (1) do notdepend for their existence on manmade political structures, fraternal communities orextensive social and economic interaction/interdependence and (2) are positive innature. It is the third strategy that I wish to defend here, and I shall attempt to do soby appealing to Dworkin’s own principles of ethical individualism. Before doing so,however, I first want to say something about the first and second strategies.

26 David Miller, ‘Cosmopolitanism: A Critique’, Critical Review of International Social and PoliticalPhilosophy, 5 (2002): 80−85, p. 82.27 David Miller, ‘Limits of Cosmopolitan Justice’, in D. Mapel and T. Nardin (eds.) International Society:Diverse Ethical Perspectives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 180n.14.28 See, for example, Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).

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The United Nations

The United Nations is arguably the most plausible candidate in respect of the firststrategy, but I think that it falls short of global sovereign power and fraternity in atleast some important respects. The UN is, of course, a grouping of states organisedaround a set of core purposes set out in its Charter—to maintain international peaceand security; to develop friendly relations among nations; to cooperate in solvinginternational problems; to promote respect for human rights. Although members ofthe UN can agree upon terms of cooperation, and UN institutions can try toimplement these terms and secure compliance, the UN is essentially a collaborativeenterprise of independent sovereign states. Indeed, Article 2 of the UN Charterclearly stipulates that ‘Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize theUnited Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domesticjurisdiction of any state’.29 In this way, members of the UN retain sovereignauthority over a large array of issues including foreign policy in relation to spendingon the reduction of global inequality. Even in exceptional circumstances where statesseek to intervene in the affairs of other states in the name of humanitarian assistance(arguably a core purpose of the UN), in 1991, the General Assembly passed aresolution stating that state sovereignty ‘must be fully respected’ and that in thiscontext, ‘humanitarian assistance should be provided with the consent of the affectedcountry’.30

Whatever else the UN is, therefore, it is not a global sovereign. But is it a globalfraternity in Dworkin’s sense? A full answer to this question would need to look intothe shared practices and expectations of member states across a range of issuesincluding trade agreements, international law, human rights, diplomacy, developmentaid, loans, refugees, the environment, and so on.31 To make things a fraction simpler,I propose to concentrate on international aid programmes and human rightsorganisations. I concur with Chris Brown that ‘the growth of voluntary aidorganizations such as Oxfam and human rights groups such as AmnestyInternational suggests that some concern for the interests and rights of citizens ofother states is quite widely accepted.’32 After all, in 1948, the General Assembly ofthe UN adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights(UDHR) and then has set up numerous bodies to monitor and police rights violationsand initiating various humanitarian aid programmes not least the World FoodProgramme (WFP). But all of this raises two additional questions which are crucialtests for fraternity. First, is the motivation behind this kind of activity based on theacceptance of a duty of concern for others? Second, does it amount to equalconcern?

29 UN Charter, Article 2(7).30 UN Resolution A/46/182 (1991), emphasis added.31 See, for example, Simon Caney, ‘Entitlements, Obligations, and Distributive Justice: The Global Level’,in D. Bell and A. de-Shalit (eds.) Forms of Justice: Critical Perspectives on David Miller’s PoliticalPhilosophy (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 292−293.32 Chris Brown, ‘International Political Theory and the Idea of World Community’, in K. Booth and S.Smith (eds.) International Relations Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 94−95.


In answer to the first question, realist and Marxist theories of international aidwill, of course, seek to explain such practices in terms of self-interest rather thanflowing from a sense of duty. Some donor countries offer unconditional aid becauseit increases the capacity and propensity of the recipients to consume exportedproducts and ensures the stability of vulnerable states on the frontline againstCommunism (and now Islam), or a donor country might offer conditional aidbecause it seeks to restrict the development of the recipient country therebysustaining its dependency on the donor.33 Even where the donor seems to have theinterests of the recipient at heart, it is possible to aver the Hobbesian explanation thatit acts because the well-being of the recipient enters into its own utility functionsthrough the need to avoid feelings of guilt. Although it is notoriously difficult todefeat these sorts of explanations, I am not persuaded that they provide the completestory here. In some instances, Western governments will hold back economicdevelopment money from countries in which there are human rights abuses evenwhere this is not to the benefit of the donor country.34 Nor can self-interest fullyexplain humanitarian aid programmes like the WFP. Although they clearly do haveexternalities which rebound to the benefit of donor countries in some of the waysdescribed above, far greater benefits accrue to the recipient countries, and this seemsto be the primary function of such programmes. Of course, from the mere fact thatbenefits to the recipient far outstrip benefits to the donor, it does not follow that thedonor acts exclusively from a duty to show concern. Even so, it is at least possible tosay that one major reason for international aid is acceptance of a moral duty towardthe citizens of foreign countries. Institutions such as the WFP are part of the UNsystem and as such are subject to the decisions of the General Assembly through theEconomic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The decisions of the General Assemblyare, however, recommendations rather than binding imperatives and the WFP islargely funded on a voluntary basis.35 Nevertheless, it might be insisted that suchactivity still demonstrates a sense of what sort and level of sacrifice one country maybe expected to make for another.

However, what reason do we have to suppose that such activities flow fromacceptance of a duty to show equal concern to others? That is to say, is it possible tointerpret these activities as being conducted on the basis of the fundamental principlethat the lives of poor people in foreign countries are no more or less valuable thanthe lives of people at home? Some positive evidence for this interpretation comesfrom the Preamble of the UN Charter: ‘We the peoples of the United Nations [are]determined to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth ofthe human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and

33 For more on these explanations, see Colin Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Richard Peet, Theories of Development (New York:Guilford Press, 1999).34 Jack Donelly, Universal Human Rights: In Theory and Practice, Second Edition (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2003), pp. 164−165.35 Paul Taylor and Devon Curtis, ‘The United Nations’, in J. Baylis and S. Smith (eds.) The Globalizationof World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, Third Edition (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2004), p. 410.

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small.’36 It goes without saying that this evidence is far from incontrovertible. It isone thing to say that the UN sets itself the goal of equal rights; quite another to saythat it expects countries not to show favouritism to their own population in thisregard. Even so, let us assume for the sake of argument that there is a significantamount of acceptance among member states of the aforementioned fundamentalprinciple. There remains, however, a seemingly insurmountable difficulty inapplying Dworkin’s conception of fraternal association to the international sphere.

Recall that Dworkin’s first condition of fraternity is that members must regardthe obligations that are owed to each other as special in the sense that they areobligations owed exclusively to those within the group. This implies that he relevantobligations are not owed to nonmembers. So the question is: who are the relevantnonmembers? In the case of the UN—with its 191 member states—these obligationscan be special only in respect of excluding the citizens of very few nonmemberstates/nations. With such a high ratio of members to nonmembers, it is hard to seethe distinction between special obligations and general duties. The difference seemsto disappear altogether if one reflects on a possible future in which every state andevery nation in the world becomes a fully fledged member of the UN. If all thepeoples of earth collectively make up a fraternal association, in what sense can it besaid that members owe special obligations to fellow members as distinct from thoseoutside the group? Who are the nonmembers, those outside the group?

One possibility is to conceive the relevant group of nonmembers as nonhumananimals. This does not mean that one has to see other animals as forming separatecommunities with their own special obligations. But it does mean that we canconceive of global associative obligations as special in the sense that they apply onlyto fellow human beings. However, on this interpretation, the putative distinctionbetween associative obligations and general duties collapses into a more familiardistinction between the obligations we owe to fellow human beings and theobligations we owe to other animals. In other words, it is hard to make sense of whythese are ‘associative’ obligations in Dworkin’s particular sense of the word whenthe key distinction is between members and nonmembers of the human race asopposed to members and nonmembers of a community. After all, Dworkin insiststhat although not all bare political communities are fraternal communities, nopolitical community can be considered to be fraternal unless it is at the same time abare political community. This means that a person who shares no actual associationwith the members of a group through shared territory, shared history, commonjurisdiction, blood line, and so on, cannot be regarded as a member of a genuinepolitical community even if others are disposed to treat him as such.37

Another possibility is to cast extraterrestrials in the role of nonmembers. Supposethat at some time in the near future, the human race is contacted by the members of ahighly developed species from a neighbouring solar system who are being affectedby our actions somehow. In these circumstances, it is not entirely unfeasible thatdespite the very great intra-planetary differences between the peoples of earth, theycould regard themselves as a single community with certain special obligations to

36 Available at: http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter, emphasis added.37 Dworkin, Law’s Empire, pp. 201−202.


http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter

each other over and above any inter-planetary responsibilities they owe to theextraterrestrials. They might authorise a special body to make decisions about andcommunicate with the alien nation. Nevertheless, it is clear that we are now movingaway from reality and into the realms of science fiction. Although it is possible toconceive of a global community which has obligations which are special in relationto a wider universe of moral concern, given the circumstances in which we findourselves presently, it seems that Dworkin’s conception of fraternal association rulesout the current existence of such obligations.

At this stage in the argument, however, it is worth emphasising that whenDworkin makes the claim that sovereignty and fraternal community are prerequisitesof a certain kind of special egalitarian concern, he does not thereby commit himselfto the stronger (and false) claim that these are the only sources of moral duty. That isto say, he does not rule out the possibility of responsibilities to show equal concernand respect based on something other than a special obligation. Indeed, in Law’sEmpire, he makes it quite plain that obligations between community members ‘maybe defeated, for even genuine associative obligations may conflict with, and mustsometimes yield to, demands of justice.’38 ‘An association of principle is notautomatically a just community; its conception of equal concern may be defective, orit may violate rights of its citizens or citizens of other nations.’39 Consider the caseof a community which embraces militant nationalism including widespread approvalof war for national self-interest. Dworkin argues that it is perfectly legitimate foroutsiders to adopt a deeply sceptical interpretive attitude toward such a communitydenying that its members do have genuine obligations to support unjust wars. Theinterpreters take the view that ‘any conflict between militant nationalism andstandards of justice must be resolved in favor of the latter’.40 Clearly, then, Dworkindoes not wish to deny that there can be duties of justice owed to peoples in otherparts of the world which do not depend on associative ties.

Two Kinds of Rights-Based Approach to International Justice

Although there may be some rights which depend for their existence on certain sortsof fraternal community and which apply only within states, can anything be said forthe existence of rights that transcend the existence of such bonds? As a rough firstapproximation, let us say that global egalitarian rights are rights to equal concernand respect that are held by any person or group of persons against the rest of theworld, where this means any person or group of persons including states,transnational corporations and global political associations. On this reading, thereare many different permutations of rights holders and duty bearers. In what follows Ishall, for reasons of brevity, provide only certain illustrations. Nevertheless, there aretwo fairly obvious limitations with the foregoing definition. The first is that talk of

38 Ibid., p. 214.39 Ibid., p. 213.40 Ibid., p. 206.

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global rights to equal concern and respect is sufficiently abstract to admit of a varietyof very different moral claims not all of which are egalitarian in the strict sense ofthe word. Miller, for example, draws a useful distinction between principles ofinternational justice which require a reduction of global inequality, principles whichdemand respect of basic rights (rights to bodily integrity, liberty and subsistence) andprinciples which call on states and corporations not to exploit others.41 Clearly, thereare some important differences between these principles, but there is at least a sensein which they each provide a different interpretation of the same abstract rights toequal concern and respect.

The second limitation picks up on a point I made at the start of this article aboutglobal rights. It is that although abstract rights to equal concern and respect aregeneral, sometimes they translate into special reparation rights, and such rights, bytheir very nature, impose duties on particular agents rather than the world in general.Hence, it is often said, some of the world’s poorest countries have special claimsagainst particular actors on the world stage arising out of identifiable historicalcircumstances—colonisation by aggressive foreign powers and the exploitativepractices of ruthless transnational corporations are just two illustrations.42

The upshot is that any full account of global egalitarian rights must not onlyspecify what they mean in concrete terms but also how the relevant rights holdersand duty bears would be determined in any given case. I shall return to the issue ofassigning rights holders and duty bearers at the end of this article. At this stage,however, I wish to concentrate on the nature of these rights.

It is important to distinguish two kinds of rights-based approach to issues ofinternational justice. One kind of approach puts the emphasis on negative rights(which specify what agents must not do to others) and typically incorporates abundle of legal and moral rights against the restriction of liberty and other forms ofharm—for example, the rights of sovereign states against foreign invasion,individual rights against torture and genocide, liberty of conscience, the right notto be harmed by an unjust world order. A second kind of approach, by contrast,highlights the need for positive rights (which specify what agents ought to do forothers) alongside negative rights, such that it also includes a much wider array ofsocial and economic rights—for example, the right of poor people around the worldto a reduction in unchosen social and economic inequalities.43 In what follows I shalloffer some illustrations of these different kinds of approaches.

I shall consider Dworkin’s own account of human rights in a moment, but I wantfirst to outline briefly the more familiar views of John Rawls, Charles Beitz andThomas Pogge. In A Theory of Justice, of course, Rawls introduces a version of theveil of ignorance in which representatives of different nations come together to agreeupon a set of laws of international justice. He initially suggests that the

41 David Miller, ‘Justice and Global Inequality’, in A. Hurrell and N. Woods (eds.) Inequality,Globalization and World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).42 Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, pp. 203−204.43 Not everyone recognises the validity of the distinction between negative and positive rights, of course.See, for example, Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U. S. Foreign Policy (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), ch. 2.


representatives would acknowledge the right of self-determination and self-defence.44 Later, in The Law of Peoples, he speaks of the duty of liberal peoplesnot to interfere in the internal life of others countries unless in response to humanrights violations as well as the positive duty to assist ‘burdened societies’ in theirstriving toward domestic justice.45 However, Rawls famously does not seek toextend the Difference Principle to the global sphere.46 Although he believes thatpresent global institutions such as the UN are sufficient to instantiate the principlesof the law of peoples, they do not support a Difference Principle designed to regulateinternational social and economic inequalities. Nonetheless, his reason for notextending the Difference Principle to the international sphere has less to do with thenonexistence of an appropriate global authority to implement it and more to do withhis conviction that doing so ‘would fail to express due toleration for other acceptableways ... of ordering society’.47 He maintains that any human rights that people in theWestern world can legitimately expect other peoples to respect must be capable ofbeing accepted by decent non-liberal peoples.48 It is important that ‘[t]hese rights donot depend on any particular comprehensive religious doctrine or philosophicaldoctrine of human nature.’49 According to Rawls, the few human rights that satisfythis constraint are: ‘the right to life (to the means of subsistence and security); toliberty (to freedom from slavery, serfdom, and forced occupation, and to a sufficientmeasure of liberty of conscience to ensure freedom of religion and thought); toproperty (personal property); and to formal equality as expressed by the rules ofnatural justice (that is, that similar cases be treated similarly) ... and security ofethnic groups from mass murder and genocide.’50

It should be observed, however, that these are predominately negative rights andare by no means as egalitarian as they might be, and this invites the following line ofobjection. Rawls draws on Articles 3 and 5 of the UDHR in drawing up his list ofhuman rights. Yet he also dismisses Article 1 of the same declaration. (‘All humanbeings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reasonand conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’51) Hedismisses Article 1 as a possible basis for overlapping consensus between verydifferent political cultures on the grounds that it can be ‘more aptly described asstating liberal aspirations’.52 My own hunch is that this complaint is more plausiblein respect of the second part of Article 1 than the first part which on the surfaceseems universal. At any rate, Patrick Hayden has rightly challenged Rawls for his‘limited’ interpretation claiming that Rawls cannot appeal to some parts of theUDHR to support his case but not Article 1, as ‘Article 1 is the very basis for all of

44 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 378−379.45 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 37.46 Ibid., pp. 115−119.47 Ibid., p. 59.48 Ibid., p. 79.49 Ibid., pp. 68.50 Ibid., pp. 65, 79.51 Available at: http://www.udhr.org/UDHR/ART01.HTM.52 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 80n.23.

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http://www.udhr.org/UDHR/ART01.HTM

the independent rights contained in the UDHR and constitution’.53 With this inmind, suppose that the principle of equal importance expressed in Article 1 doesprovide a suitable basis for principles of international justice. What implicationsdoes this have for the law of peoples? Rawls insists that liberal states may notinterfere with the self-governance of decent hierarchical societies irrespective of thefact that such societies reject the liberal view that all people have a right to equalbasic liberties.54 It is hard to see the motivation for this position once one accepts thefundamental principle of equality in existing international declarations of human rights.

Another notable example is global inequalities in income and wealth. In hisinfluential book, Political Theory and International Relations, Beitz argues that theDifference Principle (one of the central planks of justice as fairness) should beapplied to global as well as domestic social and economic inequalities. To apply theDifference Principle at the global level, Beitz argues that it is enough to appreciatethe extent to which social and economic ‘interdependencies’ between countriesaround the world generate significant social and economic inequalities that are rarelyto the benefit of the least advantaged. Some peoples are able to become and remainfar wealthier than other peoples because international trade and investment isconducted largely under the rules they dictate and which are favourable to them.Consequently, Beitz takes the view that the wealth generated by interaction betweenrich and poor countries should be husbanded and distributed to the benefit of theglobal poor.55 Rawls, however, insists that it is integral to the law of peoples thatWestern governments must respect the decisions made by free and responsiblepeoples in other parts of the world regarding such things as the trade-off betweenproduction and leisure time and even population size.56 In so far as these decisionscontribute significantly to global inequalities, it would not be acceptable to transferresources from wealthier countries to undo such inequalities.57 This response,however, conspicuously ignores those inequalities which are not due to domesticdecision-making and this is where the work of Pogge comes to the fore.

In response to Rawls, Pogge argues that to hold poor countries responsible forglobal inequalities is to commit the fallacy of ‘explanatory nationalism’, namely, tofalsely attribute the causes of poverty to national factors (such as corrupt leaders orthe culture of the country) as opposed to unjust international conditions.58

Furthermore, Pogge maintains that people in rich countries have a negative duty notto support a coercively imposed institutional order of foreign trade rules, internationalborrowing and resource privileges, international law relating to the movement ofpeople, and so on, ‘that unavoidably leaves human rights unfulfilled’,59 that is to say,

53 Patrick Hayden, John Rawls: Towards a Just World Order (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002),p. 136.54 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 71.55 See Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, p. 152; ‘Social and CosmopolitanLiberalism’, International Affairs, 75 (1999): 515−529; ‘Rawls’s Law of Peoples’, Ethics, 110 (2000):669−696.56 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, pp. 115−119.57 Ibid., p. 118.58 Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, pp. 140−141.59 Ibid., p. 170.


renders people in other countries ‘severely poor’.60 According to Pogge’s preferredconception, to have a human right is to have a strong moral claim against others notto support a coercive institutional order that makes one worse off than one ought tobe.61

Among the numerous objections that Pogge’s view attracts, however, are that (1)it places a great deal of weight on a somewhat under-explained assumption that theinstitutional order is coercive, (2) it relies on potentially controversial empiricalclaims about the ways in which countries are adversely affected overall by theinstitutional order, (3) it requires some nonarbitrary baseline from which to measurewhether a country is severely poor, and (4) it invites the reply that closer scrutinyshows that his alleged negative rights collapse into positive rights or else fail toadequately identify suitable duty-bearers. Some of these objections have been ablyexplored elsewhere, and so I do not intend to discuss them in detail here.62 I wish tofocus instead on Pogge’s rationale for assuming merely negative rights.

Pogge’s intention is to present a coherent moral apparatus with which to addressissues of global inequality whilst at the same time not falling foul of an assumptionabout rights that has been the subject of intense controversy between liberals andlibertarians for many decades. Because he emphasises the existence of merelynegative rights, Pogge believes that he cannot be accused by libertarians of positingthe existence of rights which they deny outright. As he puts it,

Libertarians insist on a minimalist constraint on what duties human rights canimpose: human rights require that we not harm others in certain ways—not thatwe protect, rescue, feed, clothe, and house them. My institutional understandingcan accept this constraint without disqualifying social and economic humanrights.63

Even if Pogge can avoid objections from libertarians by occupy the higher groundof negative rights, however, this does not mean that he can avoid objections fromegalitarians. Occupying the higher ground will only succeed on both counts if Poggecan convince egalitarians that negative rights are sufficient to meet the demands ofjustice in the international sphere.64 But this, I think, is a big ask.

One fairly obvious point is that Pogge’s retreat to negative rights restricts ourattention to those social and economic inequalities which flow from an institutionalorder which is harmful in the relevant sense. This potentially sets aside a range ofnoninstitutional and non-harm-based inequalities that might be condemned by some

60 See Thomas Pogge, ‘Priorities of Global Justice’, Metaphilosophy, 32 (2001): 6−24; ‘‘Assisting’ theGlobal Poor’ in D. Chatterjee (ed.) The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2004); ‘Severe Poverty as a Violation of Negative Duties’, Ethics andInternational Affairs, 19 (2005): 55−82.61 Thomas Pogge, ‘Human Rights and Human Responsibilities’, in A. Kuper (ed.) Global Responsibil-ities: Who Must Deliver on Human Rights? (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 14.62 See, for example, Mathias Risse, ‘How Does the Global Order Harm the Poor?’, Philosophy and PublicAffairs, 33 (2005): 349−378.63 Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, pp. 66−67.64 cf. Anthony J. Langlois, ‘Conceiving Human Rights without Ontology’, Human Rights Review, 5(2005): 5−24.

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egalitarians. In other words, it is unclear whether all global inequalities could beeliminated or rendered unproblematic from the point of view of egalitarian justicemerely by eliminating the imposition of an unjust and coercive economic system.Not all inequalities can be presented as harms in that sense. Consider, for example,the unequal brute luck of being born into a county with an ongoing and pervasiveshortfall of natural talent compared to other peoples; in being born into a countrywhose climate is such that people are at high risk of certain insect-borne diseases notfaced in other parts of the world; in being born into a country which faces a highprobability of regular natural disasters. I submit that nobody should have to sufferthese disadvantages without the assistance of the rest of the world any more thanthey should have to suffer the affects of an unequal distribution of the world’snatural resources or an unjust world order.65 Putting the point in its most crude form,in this article, I want to contrast existing work on global justice with what I shall callglobal luck egalitarianism.66

To make the same point in a slightly different way, a number of scholars ofinternational distributive justice—including Pogge67—have taken the importantintellectual step of emphasising not only inequalities which result from social andeconomic interaction but also inequalities of natural resources. Beitz, for example,argues that inequalities in the distribution of raw materials across the surface of theglobe is ‘a purer case of something being “arbitrary from a moral point of view” thanthe distribution of talents’.68 He concludes from this that resource-rich countrieshave certain natural duties in respect of the rest of the world which do not depend onmembership of global associations or interaction with resource-poor countries.69

(For his part, Pogge maintains that it is not the unequal physical distribution ofnatural resources that is unjust per se but rather the fact that ‘[t]he better-off enjoysignificant advantages in the use of a single natural resource base from whose benefitthe worse-off are largely, and without compensation, excluded.’70) While I do notseek to defend the claim that the distribution of (access to) external resources is apurer case of moral arbitrariness than the distribution of human talents, I do thinkthat Beitz is right to widen the scope of the moral arbitrariness line of argument. Ibelieve that it should be extended beyond the case of natural external resources toinclude disadvantages caused by inequalities of internal resources (skills and talents)and natural disasters, for example.

There are some limited similarities here with Dworkin’s own focus on brute luck,but before turning to Dworkin, I need to address an important methodological

65 A somewhat similar point is made by Pablo Gilabert, ‘The Duty to Eradicate Global Poverty: Positiveor Negative?’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 7 (2005): 537−550.66 The term ‘luck egalitarianism’ was first coined by Elizabeth Anderson, ‘What is the Point of Equality?’Ethics, 109 (1999): 287−337, p. 289.67 Thomas Pogge, ‘A Global Resources Dividend’, in D. Crocker and T. Linden (eds.) Ethics ofConsumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield,1999).68 Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, p. 140.69 Ibid., p. 141.70 Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, p. 202.


question. How does one prove that positive egalitarian rights exist? Suppose onesays that the existence of such rights is to be discovered through moral intuitionalone. This immediately raises the issue of fallibility. How do I know that I am notmistaken in my intuition that positive global egalitarian rights exist? It also raises theissue of justification. If a group of powerful states did decide to enforce the dutiesassociated with these rights around the world, how could they justify this action tothose who do not instinctively share the same intuitions concerning the existence ofthese rights?

One way to tackle these issues is to consider whether egalitarian rights arefundamental or based on some deeper set of principles. In his recent book, IsDemocracy Possible Here?, Dworkin argues that it might be possible to persuadeothers to accept the existence of rights to equal concern and respect by finding adeeper common ground which they can share. He argues that to find this deepercommon ground ‘we must not look to principles that are distinctly political or evenmoral but rather to principles that identify more abstract value in the humansituation.’71 In fact, Dworkin claims that almost all of us (in the Western world atleast) are united in sharing what he calls ‘two principles of ethical individualism’72

(or ‘two principles of human dignity’73). The first is ‘the principle of equalimportance’74 (or ‘the principle of intrinsic value’75). According to this principle, itmatters how well or badly people’s lives go, and it matters not just to them butobjectively speaking. The success or failure of any human life is important in itself,something we all have reason to want or to deplore’.76 The second is ‘the principleof special responsibility’77 (or ‘the principle of personal responsibility’78). Thisprinciple ‘holds that each person has a special responsibility for realizing the successof his own life, a responsibility that includes exercising his judgement about whatkind of life would be successful for him.’79

What is the relationship between these fundamental principles and rights to equalconcern and respect? It is clear that for Dworkin, the relationship is one ofinterpretation rather than entailment. He does not suppose that the principle of equalimportance (as in, the equal value of every human life) always implies an obligationto show equal concern for other persons. Rather, this principle translates into anobligation to show equal concern only ‘in certain circumstances’.80 ‘As individuals,we owe all other human beings a measure of concern, but we do not owe themconcern equal to that we have for ourselves, our families, and others close to us.’81

72 Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, pp. 5, 324.73 Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, pp. 9−10.74 Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, p. 5.75 Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, p. 9.76 Ibid., pp. 9−10.77 Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, p. 6.78 Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, p. 10.79 Ibid.80 Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue, p. 6.

71 Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 9.

81 Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, pp. 94−5.

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So, for example, ‘most of us do not suppose that we must, as individuals, treat ourneighbours children with the same concern as our own, or treat everyone we meetwith the same respect.’82 Similarly, although Dworkin believes that governmentshave an obligation to show equal concern and respect to their own citizens, he doesnot endorse the view that governments must show equal concern and respect to thecitizens of other countries.

Nevertheless, Dworkin does grant the existence of what he calls ‘baseline humanrights’ in addition to the special ‘political rights’ of citizens within their ownpolitical communities. Baseline human rights are ‘the concrete rights, like the rightnot to be tortured that set limits to how any government may act’.83 The basicthought is that whereas the question of equality of resources, for example, is abounded question (that is, a question about whether or not a government can claimto have treated its own citizens as equals), the question of human rights is anunbounded question (a question about whether or not a government can claim tohave accepted the two principles of human dignity as constraints on its conducttoward people at home and abroad).84 Dworkin takes it as read that the twoprinciples of human dignity provide common ground for liberals and non-liberalsalike and that they support baseline human rights in international justice.

These rights forbid acts that could not be justified by any intelligibleinterpretation of the ideas that people’s lives are of equal intrinsic value andthat they have a personal responsibility for their own lives. They are theconcrete rights that human rights covenants and treaties try to identify.85

There is plenty in the foregoing sketch to question. In particular, I find Dworkin’sseparation of human and political rights unconvincing. If the aforementionedprinciples of human dignity are the fundamental principles in play, then why do theytranslate into full economic rights to equal concern at the domestic level but onlybaseline human rights at the global level? Dworkin himself points to the fact thatpeople do disagree about whether universal human rights include economic rights.86

However, from the mere fact that some people interpret the principles of humandignity in a way that excludes economic rights from the category of universal humanrights, it does not follow that this is the best interpretation. This has obviousimplications for how we treat the citizens of other countries. If one accepts the basicpremise that every human life has equal intrinsic worth, it is hard to see how theimportance of showing equal concern and respect for that life in relation to thedistribution of income and wealth, for example, could cease at state borders. Torestrict the application of full egalitarian rights to the domestic level seems arbitraryfrom an egalitarian point of view, as it renders global inequalities between rich andpoor exempt from egalitarian condemnation.

82 Ronald Dworkin, ‘Liberalism’ in S. Hampshire (ed.) Public and Private Morality (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1978) 113−143, p. 125.83 Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?, pp. 35−36.84 Ibid., p. 96.85 Ibid., pp. 35−36.86 Ibid., p. 37.


I freely accept that Dworkin (and others) might insist that this is not an arbitrarydistinction because our task is to adopt an interpretive attitude toward theseprinciples, and this attitude must reflect ordinary political beliefs and practices. Inthe context of domestic politics, the principles are interpreted one way; in the contextof international politics they are interpreted in another way. Nonetheless, it seems tome that ordinary political beliefs and practices are far from conclusive in this widergenre. We have already seen that there are examples of human rights organisationsand international aid programmes which do seem to be based on the fundamentalprinciple that every human life has equal intrinsic worth, not to mention the moneyalready spent on foreign aid by liberal states. Even if they do not subscribe to flategalitarian principles at the concrete level, it is surely correct to say that these statesand organisations are egalitarian in the deeper moral sense of recognising the need toshow equal concern to individuals around the world. My main argument at thisjuncture, therefore, is simply that Dworkin makes an assumption about the correctinterpretation of the two fundamental principles of human dignity—to wit that theydo not translate into principles of equal concern at the international level—which isfar from self-evident. I do not say that contrary interpretations of the same principlesare themselves uncontroversial. I take seriously Miller’s charge that the equal worthclaim is abstract in the sense that it does not in itself tell us what ‘we’ owe to specificagents.87 But I do think that the competing interpretations deserve careful attentionand should not be summarily discounted.

Positive Rights to Equal Concern and Respect

Thus far, I have hinted at the conclusion that we require a more pluralistic orcomplex approach to issues of global inequality which incorporates positive andnegative rights. But what would such an approach look like, and would it be worthdefending? While I do not have space to provide a full account, I can briefly sketchsome important details. My tentative proposal is that every individual on the planethas a positive moral right to be treated with equal concern and respect, in someadequately substantial way, by the rest of world, and that such rights transcend theexistence of a world state, a world fraternity and the existence of a coercive worldorder. By way of clarification, however, I do not mean to suggest that people oweexactly the same things to other people regardless of context. Sometimes, the form inwhich equal concern ought to be shown will depend on who those people are and thesituations in which they find themselves. Nor do I wish to imply that these rightstranscend the existence of any association between peoples whatsoever. On thecontrary, I believe that for abstract rights to equal concern and respect to give rise tospecific duties on the part of rich people to transfer resources to the victims of badbrute luck, for example—where this means in addition to any special duties theymight already have in respect of past injustices—then as a minimum those richpeople must (1) be aware of the plight of the involuntarily poor in foreign places (or

87 David Miller, ‘Against Global Egalitarianism’, Journal of Ethics, 9 (2005): 55−79.

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cannot reasonably deny awareness), (2) have themselves benefited from some kindof brute luck good fortune (3) stand in relations such that they are able to transferresources effectively and without an unreasonably great burden on themselves. Itseems to me that these three qualifications should go some way at least to assuagingthe worry felt by many people that principles of global equality are overdemanding.What I do not accept, however, is the supposition that peoples must be associatedwith one another in substantive ways to have substantive egalitarian rights againstone another.

What are these rights based on? There are, of course, many different possibleways of trying to answer this question, but in this article I would like to propose thatthe right to equal concern is the right to be treated as a being with a capacity forenjoyment and success but also for suffering in respect of basic human needs andfrustration in relation to personal or collective goals, projects, desires, commitmentsand ambitions; whereas the right to equal respect is the right to be treated as a beingwith a capacity to pursue a long and fulfilling life in accordance with some overallplan or conception of the good whether that is conceived individually or as part of agroup. The first part is notable for its inclusion of group as well as individual goals.The second part is also importantly different from Dworkin’s formulation whichrefers to ‘human beings who are capable of forming and acting on intelligentconceptions of how their lives should be lived.’88 I justify the difference on twogrounds. The first is that the word ‘intelligent’ might add complications in terms ofcultural differences concerning the meaning and importance of such conceptions.The second is that the idea of ‘forming’ a conception of the good may be eccentric toliberal political philosophy. Far from viewing rights as enabling people to form andact on their own conception of the good, there might be many places around the worldwhere rights are not unreasonably regarded as enabling people to act on conceptionsof the good given to them by the particular cultures into which they are born.

More crucially, I suggest that these capacities support positive and not merelynegative rights and duties. Some might insist that they only support negative rightsand duties because the capacity for pursuing a long and fulfilling life in accordancewith some overall conception of the good implies a large measure of freedom ofchoice concerning how and when to assist others as well as a large degree ofresponsibility for the success or failure of one’s own life. However, I do not see whypursuing a long and fulfilling life is itself inconsistent with the idea of positiveduties, as many people do accept that the good life will include at least some positiveobligations to assist others. Nor am I convinced that the capacity to pursue a longand fulfilling life in accordance with some overall conception of the good entailstaking responsibility for every disadvantage that comes along. It seems to me thatthere are many examples of unchosen disadvantages—the unequal affect that anunforeseen tsunami will have on the distribution of income and wealth betweendifferent countries, for example—where resource transfers cannot realistically besaid to impugn or undermine the responsibility of the recipient for its own welfare.89

88 Dworkin, Law’s Empire, p. 272.89 cf. Samuel Scheffler, ‘Natural Rights, Equality, and the Minimal State’, in J. Paul (ed.) Reading Nozick(Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).


The next critical step is, of course, to say what it means for agents on the worldstage to treat the global disadvantaged with equal concern and respect in someadequately substantial way. For example, what positive duties do governments andindividuals in rich developed countries have in respect of transferring resources topoor less developed countries? I shall say more about the relevant duties in the nextsection, but for now let me simply say this. It is fairly evident that for many millionsof people around the world it is not simply unfair trade rules which cause them toface an existence of suffering and frustration with an unequal chance of pursuingtheir own conceptions of the good. Lack of foreign assistance in responding tonatural catastrophes and disease epidemics and in tackling inequalities of naturalresources and shortfalls on the side of the skills and knowledge required fordevelopment also plays a big part. It strikes me that no adequate theory of globalegalitarian rights can be blind to such things even granting the point that what countsas a talent shortfall, for example, will be to some extent dependent on localcircumstances and culture. It is also worth making the fairly routine observation thatvery often income and wealth alone cannot solve the most difficult and intricatedevelopment problems. So, there is scope for interpreting positive rights to includenot merely rights to money but also rights to infrastructure, services, schools,hospitals, food, clean water, and so on. A positive right can often imply the right toprovide some thing, but it can also mean a right to assist. (I accept that some peoplemight argue that this interpretation marks such a significant departure from equalityof resources that it no longer makes sense to describe the view in those terms.)

What objections might be levelled at such a view other than the brute claim thatthere are no such things as positive egalitarian rights at the global level? Oneobjection might be that my argument operates under the false assumption that anational government does not have a legitimate reason to do more to help a severelypoor person at home than a severely poor person in another country. Just as a parenthas a legitimate reason to show more concern for her own child than for the child ofa neighbour because it is her child, it might be argued that government has alegitimate reason to show more concern for its citizens than for foreign citizensbecause they are its citizens. Thus, Miller argues that national affinities andaffections are rather like familial affinities and affections in that they provide peoplewith a particular reason to show more concern for some than for others; and notinappropriately so. Even if one finds regrettable in some respects the rise ofnationalism, one cannot deny that national identifications and commitments do giverise to extra obligations.90

One plausible line of reply to this objection, however, is to insist (as Pogge does)that ‘special relationships can increase what we owe to our associates, but theycannot decrease what we owe to everyone else’.91 Of course, what Pogge has inmind here is that what we owe to our fellow countrymen cannot decrease what weowe to everyone else in terms of negative duties. But what, if anything, can be saidin support of the more controversial claim that special relationships cannot decrease

90 Miller, ‘Cosmopolitanism’, pp. 80−85.91 Pogge, ‘Cosmopolitanism: A Defence’, Critical Review of International Social and PoliticalPhilosophy, 5 (2002): 86−91, pp. 90−91. See also Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, pp. 78−79.

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what we owe to everyone else in terms of positive duties of equal concern? How canit be possible to increase the concern we give to some without at the same timefalling short of our obligation to treat everyone with equal concern? To be sure, toknow whether or not there can be such duties, we require a more substantial theoryof what it means to show equal concern. I shall try to sketch such a theory in the nextsection, but for now I offer the following general remarks.

I think that it is important to bear in mind a distinction between two conceptionsof showing concern. According to one conception, showing concern for a person’slife is a matter of doing what is in their best interests. Let us call this theconsequentialist conception of concern. There are strong and weak versions of equalconcern on this reading. To show strong equal concern is to give equal weight toeveryone’s interests including one’s own interests, the interests of one’s friends andfamily, the interests of one’s countrymen and the interests of strangers.92 To showweak equal concern is to favour the interests of oneself and one’s compatriots butwithout being indifferent to the interests of strangers across the other side of world.93

Compared to weak equal concern, strong equal concern seems incredibly demandingand implausible. However, I favour a second conception of what it means to showconcern. I regard showing concern as doing what is right by others, where showingequal concern is a matter of doing what is right by everyone within the universe ofconcern. I call this the deontological conception of concern. Consequentialistconcern is aggregative and allows trade-offs in a way that deontological concerndoes not. More important yet is the fact that in relation to deontological concern,what matters is not that people receive an equal amount of concern but that everyperson receives the right concern. On this reading, showing equal concern (as in,showing concern to everyone) does not necessarily mean treating others equally.Indeed, sometimes doing what is right by others will involve giving more help tothose abroad than at home. So, for example, it might be right to provide moreassistance to people in a foreign county hit by a natural disaster which they could nothave purchased insurance against through no fault of their own than to people athome struck by a similar disaster where they could have chosen to buy insurance butwere too stingy and myopic to do so. Arguably, in this case, giving more assistanceto some people than to others does not amount to a violation of our obligation totreat everyone with equal concern. That being said, I do not reject altogether thepotential importance of personal ties. After all, I might have reasons other thanjustice to want to help the victims of brute luck I know and care about more than thevictims of brute luck I do not know and care about.

However, I might face the further objection that to accept the existence of positiveegalitarian rights, a political culture must have already swallowed a significant doseof liberal ideology. In so far as the aim is to justify the existence of such rights to

92 Peter Singer, for example, argues that the rich must be scrupulously impartial between their owninterests and those of people in other parts of the world such that they must keep transferring income andwealth until they have nearly reached the point of suffering disadvantage of ‘comparable significance’.Peter Singer, ‘Rich and Poor’ in his Practical Ethics, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1993), p. 230.93 Thomas Nagel, ‘Ruthlessness in Public Life’, in his Mortal Questions (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1979), p. 84.


non-liberal peoples, it is crucial (so the objection goes) that the justification must notdepend on a conception of the person and conception of the intrinsic value ofpersons that is idiosyncratic to liberal peoples. Non-liberal peoples might reject thenotion of equal worth, for example, especially if they have strong religious reasonsto believe that some lives are intrinsically more valuable than others. There areobvious resemblances here with Rawls’ argument that liberal people must show duetoleration for other acceptable ways of ordering society.94 In fact, it might be arguedthat any talk of rights could be insulting and counterproductive. Non-liberal peoplesmight take the historical view that whereas in the past Western powers used gun-boatdiplomacy to subdue the rest of the world, they now use the rhetoric of rights tojustify foreign intervention.

I believe that we must be careful, however, to distinguish two somewhat differentissues. One is whether non-liberal decent peoples have a moral right to immunityfrom foreign intervention forcing them to treat their own citizens more equally. Asecond issue is whether inward-looking political communities have immunity fromrights to equal concern claimed against them by citizens in other countries. It seemsto me that there might be a stronger case for immunity in the former case than in thelatter. No doubt, it matters to the world’s poor whether or not rich inward-lookingpolitical communities treat them with equal concern. But I also think that it mattersto everyone else. In so far as people living in poor countries have equally strongredistributive claims against wealthy non-liberal political communities as they doagainst wealthy liberal political cultures, there is a second-order issue of fairnessconcerning the way in which the burden of reducing global inequality is to bedistributed among those in a position to act. Why should liberal states have to bearthe entire burden of reducing global inequality when they are not alone in theirwealth?

Principles of Global Justice

Even among those philosophers who accept the general idea that politicalcommunities owe some measure of concern to each other, it is contested what therelevant principles of international morality should be. Thomas Nagel believes thattreating all people with concern is likely to mean that one has a duty to come to therescue of people in foreign climes but that this duty directs countries only to step inthe case of people who are in ‘immediate danger’.95 This conception directs peoplein rich countries to rescue those in peril; not to bring about a more equal distributionper se. In the same broad family of views, someone who supports the so-called‘basic needs’ approach to international aid argues that intervention should bedirected at ensuring patterns of growth that meet the basic needs of the targetpopulation and on providing primary social services on the ground with community

94 Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p. 59.95 Thomas Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33 (2005): 113−147,p. 131.

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involvement wherever possible. On this view, rich countries should target those atthe bottom regardless of the responsibility for poverty on the part of the governmentin the country affected and even where this means a short-term loss in growth for therecipient population taken as a whole.96

Clearly, these are not entirely implausible views, but I wish to concentrate insteadon developing a kind of global egalitarianism which is more egalitarian in nature aswell as being responsibility-sensitive. In particular, I want to pursue an analogybetween principles of global justice and Dworkin’s theory of equality of resources.

One of the principal elements of equality of resources is the claim that thegovernment must on pain of violating justice as equality allow the distribution ofresources at any particular moment to be ‘ambition-sensitive’ but at the same timenot to allow it to be ‘endowment-sensitive.’97 Pursuing a simple analogy betweendomestic and international justice one might say that although poor countries mightbear some responsibility for the situations in which they find themselves, richcountries also have a duty to transfer resources to poor countries to reduce anyinequalities between them which are due to forms of brute bad luck. According tothese principles, no government can claim to uphold global rights to equal concernand respect that does not fulfil its duty to respect responsibility but at the same timeameliorate brute luck in other parts of the world. (It is open to debate whether thesame duties fall on transnational corporations.) It is important to see that the view Iam presenting here is a complex one in the sense that it recognises both negativeduties to avoid harming others (including duties against exploitation and restrictivetrade practices) and positive duties to transfer resources to (or to assist whereappropriate) the victims of unchosen disadvantage. To borrow a mode of expressionused by G. A. Cohen in connection with questions of domestic distributive justice, ‘Ibelieve that the primary egalitarian impulse is to extinguish the influence ondistribution of both exploitation and brute luck.’98 It seems to me that this complexor pluralistic view provides as plausible an interpretation of the two principles ofhuman dignity as any of the other leading alternatives in isolation, and is in somerespects more plausible.

Much more work needs to be done, of course, to transform this brief sketch into afull account. While I do not have space to engage in this enterprise here, I do need tohighlight two possible stumbling blocks. One issue is whether or not Dworkin’sdistinctions between ‘endowment’ and ‘ambition’ and ‘option luck’ and ‘brute luck’can be applied coherently to the international stage given the great many differencesbetween the actors and processes involved.99 Another important issue is the extent towhich inequalities caused by brute luck (including such things as shortfalls in natural

96 This approach came to the fore during the late 1960s and 1970s during which time Robert McNamarafamously advocated the approach to the Board of Governors of the World Bank. See Bruce Moon andWilliam Dixon, ‘Basic Needs and Growth-Welfare Trade-offs’, International Studies Quarterly, 36 (1992):191−212.97 Ronald Dworkin, ‘What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10(1981): 283−345, p. 311.98 Cohen, ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, p. 908.99 Dworkin, ‘Equality of Resources’, pp. 293, 311.


resources, lack of talent, poor climate and natural disasters) can be measured purelyin terms of resources, or whether the relevant disadvantages are better conceived ofin terms of capabilities.100

Notwithstanding these complex issues, I think that the above sketch illustrates theimportant point that in weighing up the prospects for principles of global equality itmatters which conception of equality is in play. In his ‘Justice and GlobalInequality’, for example, Miller draws an interesting distinction between twocircumstances in which justice could demand equality. The first is when people aremembers of an association or community.

When people belong to groups of this kind, it becomes a matter of justice thatthey should be afforded equal treatment with respect to those rights and otheradvantages that the group has been instituted to provide. To treat peopleunequally would amount to a failure of recognition and respect; it would be todeclare that those who receive a smaller quota of advantages are not membersin full standing but mere adjuncts.101

In fact, Miller believes that a community can support egalitarian principles ofjustice in this way only if its members possess a ‘shared identity’, ‘commonunderstandings or common purposes’ and an ‘institutional structure’ under whichthey all live.102 The second circumstance occurs when a group of individuals happenupon a set of resources and ‘there are no relevant grounds for thinking that oneperson has a better claim than another to any given benefit or resource’. Theresources are manna from heaven; nobody has historical entitlement; there are norights of discovery; there is no way to differentiate claims on grounds of desert orneed—in these circumstances, Miller claims that the resources should be sharedequally between the individuals irrespective of whether or not they are members ofthe same community.103

Where does Dworkin’s theory of equality of resources fit into this distinction andcould it be extended to the global level? This is a thorny issue, but the short answeris that some aspects of Dworkin’s theory fit neatly into the second set ofcircumstances, whereas others can fit into the first set of circumstances but neednot. Consider the desert island example. We are asked to imagine that a group ofshipwreck survivors are washed up on a desert island which has abundant resourcesand no native population. The group accepts the principle that no one is antecedentlyentitled to any of these resources, but that they shall instead be divided equallyamong them. They then agree to a Walrasian auction as a way of achieving equalityof resources.104 Miller has reasons to think that the auction is not suitable as a wayof achieving equality of resources around the world due to cultural differences inattitudes to how resources should be used.105 Even so, it is reasonably clear that any

101 Miller, ‘Justice and Global Inequality’, p. 189.102 Ibid., p. 190.103 Ibid., p. 191.104 Dworkin, ‘Equality of Resources’, pp. 285−286.105 Miller, ‘Justice and Global Inequality’, pp. 192−193.

100 See, for example, Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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plausible worldwide version of this thought experiment (properly amended) is likelyto exemplify Miller’s second set of circumstances in which there are egalitarianrights even in the absence of a community.

Another important part of Dworkin’s theory involves life after the auction inwhich the distribution of impersonal resources is affected by morally arbitraryinequalities in the distribution of native endowments and other forms of bruteluck. We are asked to imagine a series of island insurance markets which aredesigned to, if not eliminate, then to at least lessen, the influence of brute luck invarious dimensions.106 No doubt, it is possible to view the shipwrecks as forming acommunity with the kinds of ties that Miller has in mind with his first set ofcircumstances. However, does the idea of such insurance need to appeal tosomething like an island community in order to be intelligible? I believe that it canmake sense to pose the insurance question to the shipwrecks even if they regardeach other as strangers. It is by no means necessary to suppose that people share anidentity and have a sense of common understanding and obligation in order tomake intelligible their decision to purchase insurance for themselves. If this is true,then it has obvious implications for the present discussion on international justice.Surely, it might be possible to extend Dworkin’s theory to the global level bythinking about global hypothetical insurance schemes which protect people againstsuch things as lacking native talent or in being subject to certain insect-bornediseases or in relation to natural disasters. The question is: what kind and level ofinsurance against such risks would people around the world buy if they had theopportunity to do so?

At this stage in the argument, however, Miller might simply insist thatcomparative principles of justice cannot apply at the global level without a globalcommunity.107 So, for example, he writes:

In an encounter with a stranger from another community, there are certain thingsthat I may not do − if he is ill or in pain I must do what I can to help him—but itmakes no sense for either of us to try to apply comparative principles—forinstance to insist on equality in some respect.108

Simon Caney has argued in response to Miller that principles of global justice shouldbe directed at institutional structures rather individuals. The question is not howindividuals treat each other but how the world order treats people.109 However, Ithink that Miller could simply change the example so that we imagine an encounterbetween a rich country or trans-national organisation and the members of a poorvillage. For this reason I wish to focus instead on a different flaw.

106 Dworkin, ‘Equality of Resources’, pp. 296−297.107 Miller, ‘Limits of Cosmopolitan Justice’, p. 180n.14.108 Ibid., p. 171.109 Caney, ‘Entitlements, Obligations, and Distributive Justice’, p. 295.


Is it true to say that it makes no sense for either of us to insist on equality in somerespect? Once again, I think that it depends on which respect. That I owe anything tothe stranger presumably has to do with the fact that we share at least a moraluniverse if not a community. What does this mean? One way of understanding theidea of a moral universe is to say that I must justify my actions to other moral agentson grounds which they cannot reasonably reject.110 The hard question here iswhether or not I can justify my decision not to treat others equally on grounds theycannot reasonably reject. On this reading, there is one obvious sense in which I musttreat him as an equal, namely, I must at least try to justify my actions to him ongrounds which he cannot reasonably reject. But is there any more substantive sense?Suppose the stranger requests that I lessen a morally arbitrary inequality between usby giving him some of the resources which I received through brute luck. I then mullover whether or not to accept this request and how I might justify my decision to thestranger. I might decide to ignore his request quite simply because he is a stranger tome. I know very little about him and do not share his community. It is on the basis ofthis reason that I attempt to justify my decision not to show equal concern for hislife. However, it seems to me that at this point the stranger might reasonably rejectthis reason on the grounds that it is arbitrary from a moral point of view that he and Iare strangers. He did not choose to be born into a separate community, after all. Theresult is that in trying to justify my decision not to eliminate one form of arbitraryinequality between us I have unwittingly assumed the legitimacy of another form ofarbitrary inequality. The stranger reasonably rejects both reasons on the grounds of aconception of equality that says quite simply that morally arbitrary inequalitiesshould be eliminated, and it seems to me that it does make sense for the stranger toinsist on equality in this respect.

Putting the same point another way, it is important to recognise the fact that beingthe member of one political community rather than another can be, and often is, amatter of brute luck. As Dworkin himself argues, people do not choose the countriesinto which they are born and do not always have a real opportunity to move. Inwhich case, insisting that principles of justice only apply within states overlooks onemajor set of principles, namely, those that seek the elimination of arbitraryinequality. Discriminating on the basis of community membership does not merelysignify a dilution of such an egalitarian ideal but is directly ruled out by it, since todiscriminate on the basis community membership is to uphold a major kind ofarbitrary inequality. What I am suggesting, in effect, is that Dworkin has failed totake sufficiently seriously his own egalitarian principle that a just distribution is onein which the impacts of brute luck are neutralised as much as possible. Of course, itmight be countered that, for Dworkin, this demand is a bounded value: it issomething that is required only within a political community of the requisite sort.But, there again, it is difficult to see how this restriction can be maintained once werecognise the deeper principles of ethical individualism on which such values arebased and the larger moral context in which they must be interpreted.

110 For more on this general approach to moral justification, see Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to EachOther (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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Finally, I wish to address the twin objection that positive global egalitarian rightsare all well and good in theory but cannot be applied in practice because of theproblem of identifying duty-bearers and compelling compliance among them. Giventhat the world of states is not at present governed by a single sovereign and is not afraternity with clearly defined egalitarian obligations, the responsibility to showequal concern and respect must somehow be assigned elsewhere. There is, then, theconsiderable difficulty of identifying the relevant duty-bearers among a matrix ofactors on the world stage including transnational organisations, states, substateentities, small groups and even individual citizens. Not only does the absence of aunified global authority make it difficult to identify the relevant duty-bearers but italso makes it difficult to see how compliance among any putative duty-bearers is tobe enforced. Thus, Nagel argues that there can be no principles of distributive justicewithout a single coercive agency to ensure compliance among separate individualsand, therefore, that states are the largest units to which principles of equal moralconcern can apply.111 Miller also suggests that one of the main reasons why wecannot condemn global inequalities is because there is no single global agent whichoversees the allocation of resources within the universe of distribution.112

These are profoundly intricate issues which deserve a far more lengthy treatmentthan I can hope to offer here, but I can at least make the following observations. Thefirst is that although the abstract nature of the egalitarian rights which underpinobligations in respect of reducing social and economic inequalities renders it difficultto identify duty-bearers at the international level, it does not necessarily make itimpossible. One possible answer is this: the victims of bad brute luck around theworld have global egalitarian rights against the beneficiaries of good brute luck.One noticeable implication of this way of seeing the situation is that positive globalegalitarian duties will typically only fall on those moral agents who are in a positionto offer assistance qua the beneficiaries of good brute luck. This raises a furthermoral question, however. What should we say about agents that have in the pastbeen in a position to assist others and no longer find themselves in this position dueto their own deliberate and calculated gambles? In other words, do rich countrieshave a duty to maintain their wealth such that they remain in a position to assistothers? My own hunch is that there is no such duty. Justice as equality demands thatbrute luck is neutralised and voluntary choices paid for. Beyond that, it takes nostand on how agents ought to behave except where other standards of internationaljustice apply. Consequently, although it might be considered praiseworthy for richcountries to make wise choices for the sake of being in a position to assist others inthe future, this is superogatory.

My second observation speaks to the issue of enforcement. I accept that in someinstances coercive intervention might be the only effective way of ensuring thatduty-bearers fulfil their duties in accordance with justice as equality. Nevertheless,short of coercion there is much that individuals, governments and trans-nationalorganisations can do to persuade, encourage and cajole other agents to recognise

111 Nagel, ‘The Problem of Global Justice’, pp. 115−116.112 Miller, ‘Justice and Global Inequality’, pp. 190−191.


their global egalitarian duties. Even in the absence of a world state, I think that it ispossible for what one might call a coalition of the concerned to exert a notinconsiderable degree of social, economic, legal and diplomatic pressure on rights-disregarding global players. Even if this type of pressure is easier to withstand andless systematic than the type of pressure that could be exerted by a global leviathanwith a monopoly on coercive power, it does not follow that duties of globalegalitarian justice cannot be enforced whatsoever.113 At the very least it is incumbentupon those countries that do believe in the existence of such rights to set an examplethat may in time be followed by others.

Acknowledgements Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University of Essex,Department of Philosophy Seminar, 8 February 2007, and at the International Justice and Human Rightssection of the Annual Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), Pisa, Italy,8 September 2007. I am grateful to Joel Smith, Mario Solis, Béatrice Han-Pile, Saladin Meckled-Garcia,Chiara Cordelli, Basak Cali, Fabian Schuppert and Julio Montero for their useful questions andsuggestions on those occasions. I would also like to thank Laura Vallentini for taking the time to read andcomment on a pre-publication draft, which benefited greatly from her attention to detail.

113 For a much fuller treatment of the issue of securing compliance without a world state, see SimonCaney, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 5.

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alexander brown - are there any global egalitarian rights

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