Thomas Pogge: "Human Rights and Human Duties: What Do We Owe to Compatriots and Distant Strangers?"

Summary

Thomas Pogge argues that human rights create duties not only to help people in need, but also to avoid harming them—including through the international institutions and economic rules that governments establish.

1. Three kinds of human-rights duties

Pogge begins with a distinction commonly used in the United Nations system:

• Duties to respect: Negative duties to refrain from directly violating rights, such as by torturing people or depriving them of food.
• Duties to protect: Positive duties to take action to shield people from rights violations.
• Duties to fulfill: Positive duties to help people realize their rights. These include:
  • Providing what people need, such as food.
  • Facilitating access by creating institutions that make a secure food supply—and, more generally, the fulfillment of rights—possible.

“Progressive realization,” he observes, can mean that states are allowed time to fulfill some positive duties.

He proposes extending the institutional perspective to negative duties as well. People and states should not only avoid directly harming others; they should also avoid imposing or maintaining institutions that foreseeably make it difficult or impossible for people to enjoy their rights.

2. Duties to compatriots and distant strangers

Pogge distinguishes duties to help from duties not to harm:

• It can be reasonable to prioritize compatriots when providing assistance.
• Duties not to harm, however, should apply equally to compatriots and foreigners. The distance between a person and those harmed does not make the harm morally less important.
• He argues that this principle applies to institutions at both national and international levels.

3. Poverty as a human-rights failure

Pogge claims that severe poverty leaves a large share of the world’s population without essentials such as food, shelter, sanitation, electricity, literacy, and medicines. He cites estimates that poverty-related causes account for roughly one-third of deaths worldwide, and says that the right to an adequate standard of living, stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, remains unfulfilled for about half of humanity.

He challenges the idea that poverty is simply an inevitable feature of life:

• Poverty may have been difficult to avoid in earlier historical periods, he says, but severe poverty is avoidable under present conditions.
• He argues that a relatively small redistribution—around 2% of global household income, in his estimate—could eliminate severe deprivation.
• He says progress should not be judged only by whether poor people are better off than they were decades ago. The more relevant question is how much worse off they are than they could be under a fairer system.
• He cautions against accepting headline poverty and hunger statistics without examining how the measures and thresholds are defined.
• Even where poverty has declined in absolute terms, he argues, poor populations have often received a shrinking share of global economic growth.

4. Why global rules matter

Pogge rejects the claim that poverty can be explained solely by local conditions, such as geography, governance, or national policies. Differences in how countries fare do not prove that international rules are irrelevant: just as students’ different outcomes do not prove that teaching has no effect, countries can respond differently to the same institutional arrangements.

He identifies several features of the global economic order that, in his view, harm poor populations:

• Trade protectionism: Rich countries promote open markets while continuing to protect their own industries through tariffs, quotas, subsidies, and other measures. Pogge says this disadvantages poorer countries, particularly in agriculture and textiles.
• Intellectual-property rules: Strong patent protections can keep medicines expensive and restrict the production of cheaper generic versions.
• Pollution: The costs of pollution are often borne by people who are more vulnerable to its effects, while those who benefit from polluting production do not fully pay for the damage.
• Illicit financial flows and tax avoidance: Banks may accept money stolen by officials, while multinational companies can shift profits to tax havens and deprive poorer countries of tax revenue.
• The “resource” and “borrowing” privileges: Pogge says international rules allow whoever controls a state to sell its resources and borrow in its name, even if that person or group is unelected and acts against the population’s interests.
• Arms trading: Weapons supplied from abroad can help rulers maintain power without popular consent.

Taken together, Pogge argues, these rules can enable corruption, conflict, and the extraction of resources from populations that do not benefit from them.

5. Regulatory capture and inequality

Pogge says economic rules affect who receives income and wealth, so powerful interests have incentives to shape them. Wealthy groups have advantages in lobbying: they can coordinate, access expertise, and spend more. He describes a feedback loop in which wealth brings greater influence over rules, and those rules then help increase wealth and influence further.

He gives examples involving US lobbying:

• An investment analysis cited in the talk found that companies that lobbied heavily outperformed the broader S&P 500 over a specified period.
• A study of a US tax holiday, he says, found a large return to companies for money spent lobbying for the measure.
• He argues that international rulemaking creates additional opportunities for lobbying because negotiations may be less transparent and have weaker democratic oversight than domestic lawmaking.

Pogge links this political influence to rising inequality, citing figures on the growing share of income held by very wealthy people in the United States and globally. He argues that if some of the gains captured by the richest had instead gone to the poorest, severe poverty could have been ended.

6. Responsibility and what to do

Pogge concludes that the international order is inconsistent: international law affirms human rights, but economic rules can foreseeably and avoidably prevent many people from realizing them. He points to Article 28 of the Universal Declaration, which recognizes everyone’s entitlement to a social and international order in which the Declaration’s rights can be realized.

He places responsibility at two levels:

• Governments, especially powerful governments, have direct responsibility because they negotiate and impose international rules.
• Citizens share responsibility for what their governments do in their name, particularly in countries with influence over those rules.

His suggested responses are:

• Work for political change: Press governments to take their obligations seriously and to represent poor populations’ interests in international negotiations.
• Improve international rules: Support rules that are less harmful to poor populations and more compatible with human-rights fulfillment.
• Use civil-society and intergovernmental organizations: Help protect people from harms caused by existing institutional arrangements.
• Reframe aid: Assistance remains important, but Pogge says it should also be understood as responding to—and compensating for—harm that one’s government helps produce, rather than simply helping distant strangers.

Speakers and sources mentioned

• Speaker: Thomas Pogge. No other speaker is identified in the subtitles.
• Institutions, documents, and sources referenced in the lecture: United Nations and its human-rights bodies, including the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, especially Articles 25 and 28; the World Trade Organization; the Millennium Development Goals; The Economist; the S&P 500; an unnamed investment-research company; an unnamed study by three economists; the G20.
• Organizations mentioned as examples of aid providers: Oxfam, Save the Children, and Médecins Sans Frontières.