Harming the poor: towards a really ecumenical conception of international distributive justice

Abstract

In this paper I compare and critically evaluate Sreenivasan’s and Pogge’s conceptions of global justice. While Sreenivasan holds that all the currently existing theories of global justice agree that wealthy countries should transfer at least a portion of their wealth to the poor, Pogge claims that all the currently existing theories of global justice agree that wealthy countries should stop harming poor ones in the first place. In this paper I shall try to show (i) that Sreenivasan’s proposal, as presented in his articles, is broad enough to be acceptable by some international distributive justice theories, but not all of them, (ii) that Pogge’s proposal is broader than Sreenivasan, in the sense that it aims to gain support from all the different conceptions of international distributive justice, but it depends on the claim that developed countries are currently harming the global poor—a claim that I will try to defend–, and (iii) that Pogge’s and Sreenivasan’s view are compatible. In fact, if Sreenivasan added Pogge’s central claim of his argument to his own proposal, the scope of theories that he could gain support from would be much broader.