THOMAS POGGE

THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS

(Received 15 October 1998; accepted in revised form 17 May 1999)
ABSTRACT. A comparative examination of four alternative ways of understanding what
human rights are supports an institutional understanding as suggested by Article 28 of the
Universal Declaration: Human rights are weighty moral claims on any coercively imposed
institutional order, national or international (as Article 28 conrms). Any such order must
afford the persons on whom it is imposed secure access to the objects of their human
rights. This understanding of human rights is broadly sharable across cultures and narrows
the philosophical and practical differences between the friends of civil and political and
the champions of social, economic, and cultural human rights. When applied to the global
institutional order, it provides a new argument for conceiving human rights as universal
and a new basis for criticizing this order as too encouraging of oppression, corruption,
and poverty in the developing countries: We have a negative duty not to cooperate in the
imposition of this global order if feasible reforms of it would signicantly improve the
realization of human rights.
KEY WORDS: cosmopolitanism, cultural diversity, democratic governance, foreign lend-
ing, global institutions, human rights, international law, justice, nationalism, Universal
Declaration, universalism
I
A conception of human rights may be factored into two main components:
the concept of a human right used by this conception, or what one
might also call its understanding of human rights, and
the substance or content of the conception, that is, the objects or
goods it singles out for protection by a set of human rights.
We face then two questions: What are human rights? And what human
rights are there? I believe that these two questions are asymmetrically
related, in this sense: We cannot convincingly justify a particular list of
human rights without rst gaining a clear sense of what human rights
are. Yet we can justify a particular understanding of human rights without
presupposing more than a rough idea about what goods are widely recog-
nized as worthy of inclusion. This, in any case, is what I attempt to do
here.
The Journal of Ethics 4: 4569, 2000.
2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
46 THOMAS POGGE
It is worth emphasizing that even a fully comprehensive answer to the
rst question does not preempt the second. The fact that some formulated
right has all the conceptual features of a human right does not entail that
it exists (can be justied as such) any more than the fact that Robinson
Crusoe as described has all the conceptual features of a human being
entails that there is such a person. Settling what human rights there are
requires not merely careful conceptual analysis, but also substantive moral
argument pro and con.
The concept of a human right has certain central elements that any
plausible understanding of human rights must incorporate. First, human
rights express ultimate moral concerns: Persons have a moral duty to
respect human rights, a duty that does not derive from a more general moral
duty to comply with national or international legal instruments. (In fact, the
opposite may hold: Conformity with human rights is a moral requirement
on any legal order, whose capacity to create moral obligations depends
in part on such conformity.) Second, human rights express weighty moral
concerns, which normally override other normative considerations. Third,
these moral concerns are focused on human beings, as all of them and
they alone have human rights and the special moral status associated there-
with. Fourth, with respect to these moral concerns, all human beings have
equal status: They have exactly the same human rights, and the moral
signicance of these rights and their fulllment does not vary with whose
human rights are at stake.
1
Fifth, human rights express moral concerns
that are unrestricted, i.e., they ought to be respected by all human agents
irrespective of their particular epoch, culture, religion, moral tradition or
philosophy. Sixth, these moral concerns are broadly sharable, i.e., capable
of being understood and appreciated by persons from different epochs
and cultures as well as by adherents of a variety of different religions,
moral traditions and philosophies. The notions of unrestrictedness and
broad sharability are related in that we tend to feel more condent about
conceiving of a moral concern as unrestricted when this concern is not
parochial to some particular epoch, culture, religion, moral tradition or
philosophy.
2
1
This second component of equality is compatible with the view that the weight agents
ought to give to the human rights of others varies with their relation to them that agents
have stronger moral reasons to secure human rights in their own country, for example, than
abroad so long as this is not seen as being due to a difference in the moral signicance
of these rights, impersonally considered. (I can believe that the ourishing of all children
is equally important and also that I should show greater concern for the ourishing of my
own children than for that of other children.)
2
These six central elements are discussed in greater detail in the rst two sections of
my essay, How Should Human Rights be Conceived?, Jahrbuch fr Recht und Ethik 3
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 47
Various understandings of human rights are consistent with these six
points. Though I cannot here criticize all competing understandings in
detail, I want briey to present three of the more prominent ones as a
backdrop to my own. I have tried to arrange the four understandings so
that their sequence can be seen as a dialectical progression.
The rst understanding, U
1
, conceives human rights as moral rights
that every human being has against every other human being or perhaps,
more generally, against every other human agent (where this also includes
collective agents, such as groups, rms, or governments).
3
Given this
understanding of human rights, it matters greatly whether one then postu-
lates human rights that impose only negative duties (to avoid depriving)
or whether one instead postulates human rights that in addition impose
positive duties (to protect and/or to aid).
4
A human right to freedom from
assault might then give every human agent merely a weighty moral duty
to refrain from assaulting any human being or also an additional weighty
moral duty to help protect any human beings from assaults and their
effects.
I do not deny that there are such universal moral rights and duties, but
it is clear that we are not referring to them when we speak of human rights
in the modern context. To see this, consider rst some ordinary assault,
in a pub, perhaps, after some drinking and argument. Though the victim
may be badly hurt, we would not call the assault a human-rights violation.
A police beating of a suspect in jail, on the other hand, does seem to
qualify. This suggests that, to engage human rights, conduct must be in
some sense ofcial. This suggestion is conrmed by the human rights that
have actually been postulated in various international documents. Many
of them do not seem to be addressed to individual agents at all in that,
rather than forbearance or support of a kind that individuals could provide,
(1995), pp. 103120. If we can agree that these are indeed elements of the concept of
human rights, then each human right will have these six features. The converse, however,
does not hold, as alternative conceptions of human rights go beyond the shared core in two
ways: (a) by further specifying the concept of human rights through additional elements
and (b) by selectively postulating a list of particular human rights (cf. second paragraph
above).
3
Here is an example of U
1
: A human right, then, will be a right whose beneciaries
are all humans and whose obligors are all humans in a position to effect the right David
Luban: Just War and Human Rights in Charles Beitz et al. (eds.), International Ethics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 209.
4
The rst of these possibilities is exemplied in Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and
Utopia (New York: Basic Books 1974), the second in Henry Shue, Basic Rights (Prin-
ceton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Nozick and Shue prefer to write in terms of,
respectively, fundamental and basic rights. U
1
would lead to views like theirs but phrased
in terms of human rights.
48 THOMAS POGGE
they demand appropriately constrained institutional arrangements such as
equality before the law (7), a nationality (15.1), and equal access to
public service (21.2).
5
Finally, many of the rights postulated in these
documents would also seem to be limited in scope to the territory of the
state to which the right holder belongs or in which s/he resides: the right
to equal access to public service in his country (21.2) and the right to an
education (26.1). These rights are generally understood as not imposing
duties upon foreigners.
6
These shortcomings of U
1
suggest another understanding, U
2
,
according to which human rights are moral rights that human beings have
specically against governments, understood broadly so as to include their
various agencies and ofcials. This understanding solves the rst problem
by supporting a distinction between ofcial and unofcial violations,
between assaults committed by the secret police and those committed by
a petty criminal or a violent husband. It solves the second problem insofar
as governments are in a position to underwrite and reform the relevant
institutional arrangements, at least within their own territory. And it allows
a solution to the third problem in that one can distinguish between human
rights that one has against ones own government and those one has against
any government. A human right to education is a right that every human
being has against his or her own government and therefore one that gives
every government a weighty moral duty to ensure that each national or
resident in its territory receives an appropriate education. A right not to be
subjected to arbitrary arrest (9), on the other hand, is presumably meant to
be one that every human being has against every government whatsoever
and therefore one that gives every government a weighty moral duty to
refrain from arbitrarily arresting any human being at all.
7
5
I use the symbol throughout to refer to articles of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, which was adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United
Nations on December 10, 1948, as resolution 217A(III). By drawing on the Universal
Declaration for examples and illustrations, I am not implying that all the rights it lists are
human rights or that its list is complete. Rather, I am using these rights as evidence for how
the concept of human rights has been understood in the post-W.W.II era, on the assumption
that any plausible understanding of human rights must be critically developed out of this
established and customary notion.
6
The right to equal pay for equal work (23.2) would seem to be doubly limited
in scope. No duty to help maintain such equality within some country is imposed upon
foreigners. And the principle needs to be satised only within each state, not internation-
ally: Equal work may be more highly rewarded in Switzerland than in Bangladesh.
7
This distinction will not be clear-cut as some human rights may have components
that differ in scope. The human right not to be subjected to torture (5), for example,
is presumably meant to give each government negative duties not to use torture as well
as positive duties to prevent torture. The negative duties are most plausibly construed as
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 49
The main problem with U
2
is that it completely unburdens private
human agents. So long as one is not a government ofcial, one need not
worry about human rights at all. In response, it might be said that in a
democracy it is ultimately the people at large who, collectively, constitute
the government. But this response does not solve the problem in regard to
other kinds of regimes. Persons who live under an undemocratic govern-
ment need not worry about human rights at all, because it is the duty of
that government alone to fulll human rights including the human right
of its subjects to take part in government (21.1). On this understanding,
wealthy and inuential nationals would have no moral duty to do anything
to stop or to mitigate human-rights violations that their non-democratic
government is committing against their compatriots or against foreigners
at least they would have no moral duty arising from the human rights of the
victims. This limitation is not only morally implausible; it also goes against
common parlance in that we speak of a societys human-rights record
and of how well human rights are respected in some country, thereby
suggesting that we do not assign sole responsibility to the government.
This problem is avoided by yet another understanding, U
3
, according
to which human rights are basic or constitutional rights as each state ought
to set them forth in its fundamental legal texts and ought to make them
effective through appropriate institutions and policies.
8
So understood, a
human right might be said to have two quite distinct components: juridi-
cation and observance. Through its juridication component, a human
right to X would entail that every state ought to have a right to X enshrined
in its constitution (or comparable basic legal documents). A human right
to X would contain, then, a moral right to effective legal rights to X, which
gives every citizen of a state a weighty moral duty to help ensure that an
effective and suitably broad legal (or better: constitutional) right to X exists
general: A government must not order or authorize the torture of any human being at all.
But the positive duties are most often construed as being limited in scope: A government
must prevent torture on territory it can effectively control, but not elsewhere.
8
Thus, for example, Jrgen Habermas, The concept of human rights is not of moral
origin, but . . . by nature juridical. Human rights belong, through their structure, to a
scheme of positive and coercive law which supports justiciable subjective right claims.
Hence it belongs to the meaning of human rights that they demand for themselves the
status of constitutional rights. Jrgen Habermas, Kants Idee des Ewigen Friedens aus
dem historischen Abstand von 200 Jahren, Kritische Justiz 28 (1995), pp. 293319. The
quotes are from p. 310 and p. 312, italics are in the original, the translation is mine. Though
Robert Alexy explicitly refers to human rights as moral rights, he holds an otherwise
similar position which equates the institutionalization of human rights with their transfor-
mation into positive law. See Robert Alexy, Die Institutionalisierung der Menschenrechte
im demokratischen Verfassungsstaat in Stefan Gosepath and Georg Lohmann (eds.), Die
Philosophie der Menschenrechte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 244264.
50 THOMAS POGGE
within this state.
9
Through its observance component, a human right to X
would give a weighty moral duty to each government and its ofcials to
ensure that the right to X whether it exists as a legal right or not is
observed.
Though a denite improvement over U
1
and U
2
, this understanding still
faces three problems. First, U
3
may render human rights too weak, for even
when a human right is appropriately juridied and the corresponding legal
rights are observed and reliably enforced by the government and the courts,
citizens may still be prevented by social obstacles from enjoying the object
of the human right in question.
10
Being illiterate or uneducated, they may
not know what their legal rights are, or they may lack either the knowledge
or the minimal economic independence necessary to claim these rights
through the proper legal channels. This problem can be avoided by inter-
preting observance in a demanding sense as requiring that human rights
be made fully (not merely legally) effective so as to ensure secure access
to their objects.
11
I use the word fulllment for this demanding sense of
observance and say more about this notion below.
The second problem with U
3
is that, in regard to some human rights,
its juridication component would seem to be excessively demanding.
Consider a human right to adequate nutrition (25.1). A society may be so
situated and organized that all its members have secure access to adequate
nutrition, though not a legal right thereto. Would this leave the human
right unfullled? Having the legal rights required by the juridication
component is good, to be sure, but hardly so important that it must be built
into the concept of a human right. Secure access is what really matters,
and if this can be achieved through, for example, a reliable kinship system
backed up by efcient charitable organizations, then an additional legal
9
The expression suitably broad alludes to how U
2
had solved the third problem with
U
1
. Some human rights such as the human right not to be subjected to arbitrary arrest (9)
are meant to protect every human being regardless of location or citizenship. Such human
rights would not be fully juridied through a constitutional right that prohibits merely the
governments arbitrary arrest of its own citizens or residents but not that of foreigners. The
juridication component of my human right not to be subjected to arbitrary arrest would
then give a weighty moral duty to every citizen of every state to help ensure that his or her
state affords me (and, of course, every other human being) a legal right not to be arbitrarily
arrested by its government.
10
This problem could not arise, if human rights had effective legal (constitutional) rights
as their sole objects. I am assuming here that, for at least some human rights, this is not the
case.
11
As the examples indicate, my notion of secure access involves a knowledge condi-
tion: A person has secure access to the object of some human right only when she is not
prevented by social obstacles from acquiring the knowledge and know-how necessary to
secure this object for herself.
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 51
right to adequate food when needed would not seem to have the essential
importance we rightly associate with demands made in behalf of human
rights. The juridication component of U
3
is likely to lead to a conception
of human rights diluted by elements that are not truly essential.
12
Insistence
on the juridication of human rights also provokes the communitarian and
East Asian criticism that human rights lead persons to view themselves as
Westerners: atomized, autonomous, secular and self-interested individuals
ready to insist on their rights no matter what the cost may be to others or
the society at large.
13
The third problem with U
3
is that it excessively unburdens agents with
regard to human-rights fulllment abroad. According to U
3
, our task as
private citizens or government ofcials is to ensure that human rights
are juridied and fullled in our own society and also observed by our
government abroad. We have no human-rights based duties to promote the
fulllment of human rights in other countries or to help suppress human-
rights violations by foreign governments though it may be morally
praiseworthy, of course, to work on such projects. But, you will ask, what
is wrong with this unburdening? How can, and why should, we be held
responsible for the extent to which human rights remain unfullled in other
parts of the world?
II
We nd the beginnings of an answer to these questions in what may well
be the most surprising and potentially most consequential sentence of the
entire Universal Declaration: Everyone is entitled to a social and interna-
tional order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration
can be fully realized (28). This article has a peculiar status. As its
reference to the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration indi-
cates, 28 does not add a further right to the list, but rather addresses
12
This is not to deny that some human rights are difcult or impossible to fulll without
corresponding legal or even constitutional protections. This is clearly true, for example, of
a human right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating
fundamental rights granted by the constitution or by law (8). It is also hard to imagine
a society under modern conditions whose members are secure in their property or have
secure access to freedom of expression even while no legal right thereto exists. I assume
below that secure access to the objects of civil and political human rights generally requires
corresponding legal protections.
13
This criticism has been voiced, for instance, by Singapores patriarch Lee Kuan Yew
and by Mary Ann Glendon: Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New
York: The Free Press, 1991).
52 THOMAS POGGE
the concept of a human right, says something about what human rights
are. It is then consistent with any substantive account of the objects that
a scheme of human rights ought to protect even while it signicantly
affects the meaning of any human rights postulated in the other Articles of
the Universal Declaration: They all are to be understood as claims on the
order, or institutional structure, of any comprehensive social system.
14
28 suggests then a fourth, institutional understanding of human rights,
U
4
. According to U
4
, postulating a human right to X is tantamount to
declaring that every society (and comparable social system) ought to be
so organized that all its members enjoy secure access to X. To be sure, no
society can make the objects of all human rights absolutely secure. And
making them as secure as possible would constitute a ludicrous drain on
societal resources for what, at the margins, might be very minor benets
in security. To be plausible, any conception of human rights that uses
the concept I propose must therefore incorporate an idea of reasonable
security thresholds: Your human rights are fully realized (fullled) when
their objects are sufciently secure with the required degrees of security
suitably adapted to the means and circumstances of the relevant social
system.
15
U
4
can be further specied through two plausible assumptions: (1)
Social and international orders that do not satisfy the condition of 28
can be ranked by how close they come to fully realizing human rights:
Social systems ought to be structured so that human rights can be realized
in them as fully as possible. (2) One can judge how fully human rights
can be realized in some institutional order by how fully they generally are,
or (in the case of a hypothetical order) generally would be, realized in it.
In light of these two assumptions, 28 is then interpreted as holding that
the assessment of an institutional order is to be based primarily on how
14
My reading of 28 emphasizes its statement that all human beings have a claim that
any institutional order imposed upon them be one in which their postulated rights and
freedoms can be fully realized. 28 would seem to make the additional statement that
human beings have a claim that such an order be newly established in any (state-of-nature
or failed state) contexts in which no institutional order exists.
15
Thus, your human right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association is fullled
by some institutional order, when it is sufciently unlikely that your attempts to associate
or assemble with others would be thwarted or punished by ofcial or nonofcial agents or
agencies. Of course, what is unlikely may nevertheless happen. According to U
4
, a person
may actually be assaulted even while his human right to physical security (3) is fullled,
and anothers like right may be unfullled even while she suffers no actual attack. The task
of specifying, for the object of each particular human right, acceptable probabilities for
threats from various sources belongs to the second, substantive component of a conception
of human rights.
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 53
much better or worse human rights are or would be fullled in it than in its
feasible alternatives.
Although it leaves open which purported human rights we ought to
accept as such, U
4
is nevertheless normative, and this not merely in the
trivial sense that it presents itself as the most plausible explication of a
commonly used expression. It is normative also in that on the assumption
that human rights express weighty moral concerns it entails a signicant
moral thesis (whose precise content depends, however, on which particular
human rights will be included in our conception): Any institutional order is
to be assessed and reformed principally by reference to its relative impact
on the fulllment of the human rights of those on whom it is imposed.
16
Pursuant to U
4
, human rights are then the paramount elements in
the comparative assessment of institutional schemes. A human right to
freedom of peaceful assembly and association, for example, implies that
human beings have a moral claim that their society be structured in such
a way that they can securely exercise these two freedoms. To honor this
claim, we must ensure not merely that our government and its ofcials
respect these freedoms, but also that limitations and violations of them on
the part of other persons are effectively deterred and prevented.
This last point is a crucial element of the institutional understanding
of human rights. An institutional order fails to fulll human rights even
if it merely fails sufciently to protect their objects.
17
And yet, insecure
access to the objects of human rights is nevertheless more serious when
its source is ofcial. It is, other things equal, more important that our laws
and the agents and agencies of the state should not themselves endanger the
objects of human rights than that they should protect these objects against
other social dangers.
18
16
Relative, because we are making a comparative judgment: about how much better or
worse human rights are fullled in this institutional order than they would be fullled in
its feasible alternatives.
17
One may think here of the, still common, ofcial tolerance for domestic violence
against women.
18
This differential weighing is deeply rooted in our moral thinking and shows itself,
for instance, in our attitudes toward the criminal law and the penal system. The point
can be illuminated most economically, perhaps, by distinguishing, in a preliminary way,
six ways in which a social order may affect the goods and ills of its participants. The
following illustration uses six different scenarios, arranged in order of their intuitive moral
signicance, in which, due to prevailing social institutions, certain innocent persons are
avoidably deprived of some vital nutrients V (the vitamins contained in fresh fruit, say):
First-class shortfalls are ofcially mandated, paradigmatically by the law (legal restrictions
prevent certain persons from buying foodstuffs containing V). Second-class shortfalls arise
from legally authorized conduct of private subjects (sellers of foodstuffs containing V
lawfully refuse to sell to certain persons). Third-class shortfalls are foreseeably engendered
54 THOMAS POGGE
If a societys institutional order avoidably fails to fulll human rights,
then those of its members who do not support the requisite institutional
reforms are violating a negative duty of justice: the duty not to cooperate
in the imposition of an unjust institutional order without making serious
efforts within their means toward initiating and supporting appropriate
institutional reforms. On U
4
, your human rights are then not only moral
claims on any institutional order imposed upon you, but also moral claims
against those (especially: more inuential and privileged) persons who
contribute to its imposition.
19
III
U
4
could be rather close to U
3
, if institutional order were interpreted
narrowly as referring only to national schemes of social institutions.
However, 28 explicitly rules out this reading by insisting that human
rights involve claims on institutional schemes in general and on our global
(international) institutional order in particular. The remainder of this
through the uncoordinated conduct of subjects under rules that do not specically mention
them (certain persons, suffering severe poverty within an ill-conceived economic order,
cannot afford to buy foodstuffs containing V). Fourth-class shortfalls arise from private
conduct that is legally prohibited but generally tolerated (sellers of foodstuffs containing
V illegally refuse to sell to certain persons, but enforcement is lax and penalties are mild).
Fifth-class shortfalls arise from natural factors whose effects social rules avoidably leave
unmitigated (certain persons are unable to metabolize V due to a treatable genetic defect
but are not receiving the treatment that would correct their handicap). Sixth-class short-
falls, nally, arise from self-caused factors whose effects social rules avoidably leave
unmitigated (certain persons are unable to metabolize V due to a treatable self-caused
disease brought on, perhaps, by their maintaining a long-term smoking habit in full
knowledge of the medical dangers associated therewith and are not receiving the treat-
ment that would correct their ailment). Behind the moral signicance we attach to these
distinctions lies the idea that our social institutions and their political and legal organs
should not merely serve justice, but also symbolize it. The point is important, because it
undermines the plausibility of consequentialist (e.g., utilitarian) and hypothetical-contract
(e.g., Rawlsian) conceptions of justice which assess social institutions from the standpoint
of prudent prospective participants, who, of course, have no reason to care about this
distinction among sources of threats. My critique of such recipient-oriented conceptions
of justice is presented in Three Problems with Contractarian-Consequentialist Ways of
Assessing Social Institutions, Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1995), pp. 241266, esp.
Section 5 [and in Gleiche Freiheit fr alle? in Otfried Hffe (ed.), Rawls Theorie der
Gerechtigkeit (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997)].
19
This understanding of human rights is laid out more extensively in my How Should
Human Rights Be Conceived?, Jahrbuch fr Recht und Ethik 3 (1995), pp. 103120. That
earlier essay applied the idea only to the case of national institutional schemes, while the
present one applies it mainly to our global institutional order.
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 55
essay will concentrate on this more specic moral thesis: that our global
institutional order is to be assessed and reformed principally by refer-
ence to its relative impact on human rights fulllment. This is one way
of saying that human rights in our time have global normative reach: A
persons human rights entail not merely moral claims on the institutional
order of her own society, which are claims against her fellow citizens, but
also analogous moral claims on the global institutional order, which are
claims against her fellow human beings. Our responsibilities entailed by
human rights are engaged by our participation in any coercively imposed
institutional order in which some persons avoidably lack secure access to
the objects of their human rights, and these (negative) responsibilities are
extended, then, through the emergence of a global institutional order in
whose coercive imposition we collaborate.
20
This thesis must be distinguished from another, more common but also
less plausible, moral assertion, which emerges when, in the context of U
1
,
human rights are interpreted as entailing (positive) duties to protect the
assertion, namely, that we ought to defend, as best we can, the objects
of the human rights of any person anywhere. While postulating merely
positive (and thus presumably weaker) responsibilities, this thesis is also
stronger than mine in that it does not make the global normative reach
of human rights conditional upon the existence of a worldwide institu-
tional order through which our political and economic decisions have a
signicant impact on the lives of persons all over the world. My thesis
does involve this conditionality: What 28 is asking of the citizens and
governments of the developed states is not that we assume the role of a
global police force ready to intervene to aid and protect all those whose
human rights are imperiled by brutal governments or (civil) wars, but that
we support institutional reforms toward a global order that would strongly
support the emergence and stability of democratic, rights-respecting and
peaceful regimes and that would also tend to reduce radical economic
deprivations and inequalities, which now engender great vulnerabilities
20
On the stronger reading of 28 (cf. footnote 14), we would have such responsibilities
to establish a global institutional order that fullls human rights even if no such order
existed at present. It is doubtful, however, whether these responsibilities could, in such a
context, be considered to be negative ones. Immanuel Kant suggests that they may be: A
human being (or a people) in a mere state of nature robs me of this assurance and injures
me through this very state in which he coexists with me not actively (facto), but through
the lawlessness of his state (statu iniusto) through which I am under permanent threat from
him and I may compel him either to enter with me into a common juridical state or to
retreat from my vicinity [Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (1795), in Preuische
Akademieausgabe, Vol. VIII (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1923), 349n (my translation)].
56 THOMAS POGGE
to civil rights violations as well as massive premature mortality from
malnutrition and easily curable diseases.
I have encountered much resistance to this moral thesis, especially
from social theorists. It is not the case, of course, that these critics are
opposed to human-rights fulllment. Not at all. Rather, they dispute the
empirical presuppositions of my moral thesis, which are that the fulll-
ment of human rights importantly depends on the structure of our global
institutional order and that this global institutional order is to some extent
subject to intelligent (re)design by reference to the imperative of human
rights fulllment. Let me then try to make plausible that these empirical
presuppositions hold.
Talk of our global institutional order sounds horribly abstract and
requires at least a brief explication. There is, rst and foremost, the insti-
tution of the modern state. The land surface of our planet is divided into
a number of clearly demarcated and non-overlapping national territories.
Human beings are matched up with these territories, so that (at least for
the most part) each person belongs to exactly one territory. Any person
or group effectively controlling a preponderant share of the means of
coercion within a territory is recognized as the legitimate government
of both the territory and the persons belonging to it. This government is
entitled to rule its people through laws, orders and ofcials, to adjudicate
conicts among them, and to exercise ultimate control over all resources
within the territory (eminent domain). It is also entitled to personify
its people against the rest of the world: to bind them vis--vis outsiders
through treaties and contracts, to regulate their relations with outsiders, to
declare and prosecute wars in their name, and to control outsiders access
to the countrys territory. In this second role, a government is considered
continuous with its predecessors and successors: bound by the undertak-
ings of the former, and capable through its own undertakings of binding
the latter. There are, of course, various minor deviations
21
and also many
further, less essential features of our global order. But these most basic
features will sufce for now.
I will try to show through two examples that there are feasible reforms
of our global order that would, quite clearly, lead to substantial gains in
terms of human rights fulllment. My rst example concerns the currently
21
There are stateless persons, persons with multiple nationalities and those who are
citizens of one country but reside in or are visiting another. We have Antarctica, continental
shelves, disputed areas and areas that are contracted out (such as Guantanamo Bay and
Hong Kong, though the latter case is also a beautiful illustration of the continuity condi-
tion). And groups are sometimes recognized as the legitimate government even though they
do not control a preponderant share of the means of coercion within the relevant territory
(Pol Pots Khmer Rouge in the 1980s or Bertrand Aristide in the 1990s).
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 57
prominent topic transition to democracy. Much has been written on how
a new democratic government should deal with the crimes committed by
an evil predecessor. Much less, and far too little, has been written about
how a new democratic government might reduce the likelihood of demo-
cratic institutions being overturned once again in the future. Yet, even
more important is the extension of this forward-looking question to our
global institutional order: How can global institutions be reshaped so as to
become more supportive of democratic government? So long as the inter-
national criterion for the legitimacy of governments is effective control,
there are strong incentives (e.g., for military commanders) to overthrow
a democratic government: Once in power, putschists can count on all the
rewards of international recognition. They can, for example, control and
hence prot from the sale of the countrys natural resources.
22
They can
also borrow funds abroad in the name of the whole country (the interna-
tional borrowing privilege) and then spend these funds to entrench their
rule. Foreign bankers need have no special worries about being repaid in
the event that democracy returns, because any future government will be
considered obligated to repay the loans of any predecessor and will have
to comply on pains of being shut out of the international credit markets.
Could we modify our global order so that it exerts a more favorable
inuence on the stability of democratic governments? One might begin
by proposing, as a principle of international law, that a people need not
repay loans incurred by a government that ruled them in violation of
constitutionally recognized democratic procedures. This principle prevents
neither putschists from coming to power nor lenders from loaning money
to putschists. But it does render such loans considerably more risky and
thereby entails that putschists can borrow less and this on less favorable
terms. It thus reduces the staying power of undemocratic governments and
the incentives for attempting a coup in the rst place.
This proposal needs renement, especially in two respects. First, it
requires the instituting of a neutral council that would determine, in
an internationally authoritative way, whether a particular government is
constitutional or not.
23
This council might be fashioned on the model
22
The great importance of this international resource privilege is extensively
discussed in my lecture On International Redistribution (Stanford University, April 16,
1999).
23
This council would work only in the interest of democratic constitutions. Its deter-
minations would have consequences not only for a governments ability to borrow abroad,
but also for its domestic and international standing. A government that has been ofcially
declared illegitimate would be handicapped in myriad ways (trade, diplomacy, investments,
etc.) a fact that would contribute to the deterrent effect of the proposed institution and
hence to its tendency to reduce the frequency of coup attempts and civil wars.
58 THOMAS POGGE
of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, but it should also
have specially trained personnel for observing and in special cases even
conducting national elections. Democratic governments could facilitate
the work of the council, and thereby contribute to the stability of democ-
racy in their country, by incorporating into their written constitutions or
basic laws clear legitimacy criteria that also x precisely how these criteria
can be legitimately revised.
Second, a destabilizing inuence on existing democratic governments
must be ruled out. Such an inuence might come about as follows. If
an ofcially illegitimate government cannot, in any case, borrow abroad
in the name of the entire country, it may see no reason to service debts
incurred by democratic predecessors. This fact might make borrowing
abroad more difcult for democratic governments perceived to be in
danger of being overthrown which would not be, of course, in the
spirit of my proposal.
24
This difculty might be overcome through an
international loan insurance fund that services the debts of democratically
legitimate governments whenever illegitimate successors refuse to do so.
This fund, just as the council proposed above, should be nanced jointly
by all democratic states. This would require some states, the enduringly
stable democracies, to contribute to a fund from which they will hardly
ever prot directly. Their nancial contribution would, however, be small,
because my proposal would render the overthrow of democratic regimes
much less frequent, and it would also be well justied in view of the gain
for democratization, which would bring with it gains for the fulllment of
human rights and the avoidance of wars and civil wars.
25
24
I want to thank Ronald Dworkin for seeing this difculty and for articulating it
forcefully.
25
An existing alternative proposal would allow each country to authorize military
interventions against itself for the event that a future government signicantly violates
democratic principles (Farer) or human rights (Hoffmann) [see Tom J. Farer, The United
States as Guarantor of Democracy in the Caribbean Basin: Is There a Legal Way?, Human
Rights Quarterly 10 (1988), pp. 157176; A Paradigm of Legitimate Intervention in Lori
Fisler Damrosch (ed.), Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conicts
(New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), pp. 316347; and Stanley Hoff-
mann, Delusions of World Order, New York Review of Books 39 (1992), pp. 3743].
Proposals of this kind have two drawbacks: Military interventions will, sometimes at
least, be bloody, and decisions about intervention will generally be co-determined by
extraneous (e.g., strategic) interests of the potential intervening states. Without rejecting
(or supporting) such proposals, I have here suggested a less radical and less risky modi-
cation which shows more clearly I believe (though I could not present all its details and all
signicant objections against it) that our current world order could, with some good will on
the part of the rich countries, be modied so that it would exert a signicant force toward
democratization.
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 59
My other example concerns severe and widespread poverty in the
context of extreme socioeconomic inequality. In the existing global order,
which allocates property rights in natural resources territorially to the
various states or their governments, hundreds of millions suffer severe
poverty and malnutrition
26
and all the associated, easily and cheaply
curable but still often deadly diseases.
27
I have argued elsewhere that this
suffering could be abolished rather quickly through the introduction of a
Global Resources Dividend (GRD).
28
This proposal is modest in that it
accepts the existing state system and, in particular, leaves each national
government in control of the natural resources in its territory. Governments
are required, however, to pay a proportional dividend on any resources
they decide to use or sell. The word dividend indicates that the proposal
regards all human beings, including those whose access to resources is now
severely restricted, as owning an inalienable stake in all limited natural
resources. As with preferred stock, this stake confers no control over
whether or how natural resources are to be used, but merely a claim to
share in their economic benets. The GRD could cover all mineral wealth
as well as the use of soil (in agriculture) and of air and water (e.g., for
discharging pollutants).
26
1.3 billion persons, that is 22 percent of the worlds population, live below the inter-
national poverty line, which means that their daily income has less purchasing power than
one Dollar had in the US in 1985, less purchasing power than $1.53 has in the US today.
As a consequence of such severe poverty, 841 million persons (14 percent of humankind)
are today malnourished, 880 million (15 percent) are without access to health services, one
billion (17 percent) are without adequate shelter, 1.3 billion (22 percent) are without access
to safe drinking water, two billion (33 percent) are without electricity and 2.6 billion (43
percent) are without access to sanitation [UNDP: Human Development Report 1998 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 49]. As a further consequence of such severe
poverty, a quarter of all children between 5 and 14, 250 million in all, are compelled to
work, often under cruel conditions in mines, quarries and factories as well as in agriculture,
construction, prostitution, textile and carpet production: At least 120 million children
between the ages of 5 and 14 work full time. The number is 250 million, or more than
twice as many, if we include those for whom work is a secondary activity (International
Labor Organization: http://www.ilo.org/public/english/270asie/feature/ch ild.htm).
27
About one third of all deaths, some 50,000 daily, are due to poverty-related causes
such as measles, pneumonia and diarrhea, which could easily be prevented through
adequate nutrition and safe drinking water or be cured through cheap rehydration packs
and antibiotics [United Nations Childrens Fund: The State of the Worlds Children 1998
(New York: Oxford University Press 1998)].
28
Thomas W. Pogge, A Global Resources Dividend in David A. Crocker and Toby
Linden (eds.), Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship
(Lanham: Rowman & Littleeld, 1998). This essay discusses the details of the proposals,
reasons for and against, as well as an important alternative to it: the so-called Tobin Tax.
60 THOMAS POGGE
Proceeds from the GRD are to be used toward the emancipation of the
present and future global poor so that nally all human beings will be able
to meet their basic needs with dignity. The point is then not merely to
improve the nutrition, medical care and sanitary conditions of the global
poor, but also to ensure that they themselves can take care of their basic
interests and defend these effectively against the ambitions of politically
and economically more powerful persons and groups. To achieve this, they
must be free from relations of personal dependence and be literate, they
must have certain basic rights and be able to understand and defend them,
and they must be able to learn a profession and to participate as equals in
the economy as well as in politics.
In an ideal world, GRD payments could be made directly to the govern-
ments of the poorest societies, which could use them to free their poorest
citizens from taxes and debts, to improve their education, medical care and
infrastructure, and to offer them, or their organizations, land, capital, or
low-interest loans. So long as governments are prone to corruption, it will
often be more efcient to use other channels for the same purpose: inter-
national organizations such as UNICEF, UNDP, WHO, or Oxfam, which
would need to be reorganized in light of their new tasks and whose perfor-
mance, like that of governments, would have to be continuously monitored.
The inefciency of conventional development aid
29
underscores the need
for these organizations to be oriented exclusively toward poverty eradica-
tion and hence to be insulated, as far as possible, from the strategic and
economic interests of all governments.
A government may make it entirely impossible to improve the circum-
stances of the poor in its country. In such cases, the funds should go
elsewhere, where they will make a difference in reducing poverty and
disadvantage. The point of the GRD is, after all, to secure for the poorest
persons (not states) their fair share of the benets from natural resources.
GRD payments will, indeed, not merely improve the conditions of their
intended beneciaries, but indirectly also those of their governments and
compatriots. The rules of the GRD scheme should take advantage of this
fact. The more effectively a government reduces poverty in its country, the
more of this countrys theoretical GRD share should be allocated to this
country and the more of this allocated share should be paid out directly
to its government. In this way the governments and economic elites of the
29
There are various studies showing how development aid often benets those capable
of reciprocation, i.e., the elites in the politically more important developing countries.
In addition, such aid is often focused on expensive high-visibility projects in which rms
of the donor country can protably participate. For more on this theme and for relevant
references, see the cover story Why Aid is an Empty Promise, The Economist, May 7,
1994, pp. 1314 and 2124.
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 61
poor countries have a clear incentive to contribute to the success of the
GRD regime. This incentive may not always be effective, because at least
some of those in power will also have an interest in keeping the domestic
poor ignorant, impotent, dependent and exploitable. The incentive would
nonetheless shift the political balance of forces in the right direction:
With the GRD regime, reforms would be pursued more vigorously and
in more countries, and would also succeed faster and more often, because
this regime would stimulate a peaceful competition in effective poverty
eradication among governments and international organizations.
IV
These brief remarks on two examples illustrate the following important
points. (1) The fulllment of human rights in most countries is strongly
affected not merely by national factors (culture, power structures, natural
environment, level of technical and economic development), but also by
global ones. (2) Explanations in terms of national and global factors do
not simply compete with each other. Only their synthesis: one explanation
that integrates factors of both kinds, can be a true explanation. This is
so, because the effects of national factors are often strongly affected by
global factors (and vice versa) and because global factors strongly shape
those national factors themselves (though the inverse inuence is gener-
ally slight). (3) The inuences emanating from our global order are not
necessarily the way they are, but are co-determined by relatively minor
and humanly controllable institutional features (such as the presence or
absence of the two institutions I have proposed).
That these facts are so often overlooked is due to the following circum-
stances: In contrast to the often dramatic institutional developments within
national societies (such as recently in Eastern Europe), change in our
global order has been glacial. In contrast to the colorful variety of national
institutional schemes, our global order also has no simultaneous alterna-
tives with which it might be compared. These circumstances explain the
tendency to perceive this order as natural and inert. Great international
variations in the fulllment of human rights tend furthermore to draw
our attention to factors with regard to which countries differ. Through an
exhaustive analysis of these factors, it seems, all phenomena relevant to
the fulllment of human rights can be explained. And yet, it is not so:
When human rights are better fullled in one country than in another,
then there must be, of course, some difference that contributes to this
discrepancy. But an explanation that merely points to this difference leaves
many questions open. One question concerns the broader context which
62 THOMAS POGGE
determines that national factors have these effects rather than others. It is
quite possible that in the context of another global order the same national
factors, or the same international differences, would have quite another
impact on the fulllment of human rights.
30
Another question concerns
the explanation of the national factors themselves. It is quite possible that,
within a different global order, national factors that tend to undermine the
fulllment of human rights would occur much less often or not at all.
31
These considerations show that the global level of human rights fulllment
cannot be explained in terms of national factors alone.
Our two examples thus illustrate the empirical background against
which the global demand of 28 makes sense. It is the point of human
30
An analogous point plays a major role in debates about the signicance of genetic vis-
` a-vis environmental factors: Factors that are quite unimportant for explaining the observed
variation of a trait (e.g., height, IQ, cancer) in some population may be very important
for explaining this traits overall level (frequency) in the same population. Suppose that,
in some province, the observed variation in female adult height (5460 inches) is almost
entirely due to hereditary factors. It is still quite possible that the height differentials among
these woman are minor compared to how much taller they all would be (6774 inches) if
it had not been the case that, when they were growing up, food was scarce and boys were
preferred over girls in its distribution. Or suppose that we can predict quite accurately, on
the basis of genetic information, who will get cancer and who will not. It is still quite
possible that, in a healthy environment, cancer would hardly occur at all.
31
This point is frequently overlooked by John Rawls, for example, when he attributes
the human rights problems in the typical developing country exclusively to local factors:
The problem is commonly the nature of the public political culture and the religious and
philosophical traditions that underlie its institutions. The great social evils in poorer soci-
eties are likely to be oppressive government and corrupt elites [John Rawls, The Law
of Peoples in Stephen Shute/Susan Hurley (eds.), On Human Rights (New York: Basic
Books, 1993), p. 77]. This supercial explanation is not so much false as incomplete. As
soon as one asks (as Rawls does not), why so many developing countries (LDCs) have
oppressive governments and corrupt elites, one will unavoidably hit upon global factors
such as the ones discussed in my two examples: Local elites can afford to be oppressive and
corrupt, because, with foreign loans and military aid, they can stay in power even without
popular support. And they are so often oppressive and corrupt, because it is, in light of
the prevailing extreme international inequalities, far more lucrative for them to cater to the
interests of foreign governments and rms rather than those of their impoverished compa-
triots. Examples abound: There are plenty of LDC governments that came to power and/or
stay in power only thanks to foreign support. And there are plenty of LDC politicians and
bureaucrats who, induced or even bribed by foreigners, work against the interests of their
people: for the development of a tourist-friendly sex industry (whose forced exploitation
of children and women they tolerate and prot from), for the importation of unneeded,
obsolete, or overpriced products at public expense, for the permission to import hazardous
products, wastes, or productive facilities, against laws protecting employees or the environ-
ment, etc. It is perfectly unrealistic to believe that the corruption and oppression in the
LDCs, which Rawls rightly deplores, can be abolished without a signicant reduction in
international inequality.
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 63
rights, and of ofcial declarations thereof, to ensure that all human beings
have secure access to certain vital goods. Many persons currently lack
such security.
32
We can assign responsibility for such insecurity to the
governments and citizens of the countries in which it occurs; and doing
so makes good sense. But leaving it at this does not make good sense. For
the hope that these countries will, from the inside, democratize themselves
and abolish the worst poverty and oppression is entirely nave so long as
the institutional context of these countries continues to favor so strongly
the emergence and endurance of brutal and corrupt elites. And the primary
responsibility for this institutional context, for the prevailing world order,
lies of course with the governments and citizens of the wealthy countries,
because we maintain this order, with at least latent coercion, and because
we, and only we, could relatively easily reform it in the directions indi-
cated. 28 must be read as a recognition of these points: a clear repudiation
of the common and ever so convenient conviction that human rights do not
reach beyond national borders, that the human rights of foreigners (living
abroad) normally involve no moral claims against me.
33
The institutional understanding of human rights thus tends to under-
mine the self-satised detachment with which the governments and
peoples of the wealthy West tend to look down upon the sorry state of
human rights in many of the so-called less developed countries: This
disaster is the responsibility not only of their governments and populations,
but also ours, in that we continuously impose upon them an unjust global
order instead of working toward a reformed one in which the human rights
of all could be fully realized.
34
32
This is so no matter which of the available substantive accounts of human rights one
might endorse.
33
For a different argument, which attacks the same conviction by appeal to the inher-
ently regrettable incentives it provides, see my Loopholes in Moralities, Journal of
Philosophy 89 (1992), pp. 7998.
34
Participants in an institutional order will be differentially responsible for its moral
quality: Inuential and privileged participants should be willing to contribute more to the
maintenance of a just, or the reform of an unjust social order. Moreover, we must here
distinguish responsibility from guilt and blame. That we share a negative responsibility
for an injustice means that we contribute to it causally and that we can and should act
differently. It does not follow from this that we are also guilty or blameworthy on account
of our conduct. For there might be applicable excuses such as, for instance, factual or moral
error or ignorance.
64 THOMAS POGGE
V
Having shown that the global moral thesis embedded in the institutional
understanding of human rights makes sense, let me now say a little more
about the advantages of this understanding. Some important advantages
emerge from the discussion of U
1
U
3
: The institutional understanding
is more suitable for singling out the truly essential elements in human
quality of life and, in particular, avoids any conceptual connection with
legal rights. Even those who are hostile to a legal-rights culture can share
the goal of establishing for all human beings secure access to certain vital
goods (the objects of our human rights). In this section and the next, I will
try to lay out two further important advantages of the institutional under-
standing through which it can facilitate agreement on the specication of
that goal and on how to pursue it on the global plane.
The rst of these additional advantages is that the institutional under-
standing of human rights greatly reduces the gap between civil and
political rights, on the one hand, and social, economic and cultural rights,
on the other a gap that has led to much discord in the UN and elsewhere.
On the institutional understanding, it is not true that civil and political
rights require only restraint, while social, economic and cultural rights
demand positive efforts and costs. Rather, the division of negative and
positive duties now cuts across the various categories of rights: Every
person has a negative duty not to collaborate in the avoidable imposition
upon others of an institutional order in which they lack secure access to the
objects of their human rights.
35
Moreover, when our duty is to fulll human
rights in my sense, then there is no straightforward correlation of means
and ends. In fact, there is no way of telling in advance what the fulllment
of any given human right will require. In order to fulll the classical civil
right to freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment, for instance, the
political and economic elite of India may have to do much more than create
and enforce appropriate criminal statutes. They may also need to establish
adequate social and economic safeguards, ensuring perhaps that domestic
servants are literate, know about their rights and options, and have some
economic security in case of job loss. Conversely, in order to fulll a
human right to adequate nutrition, perhaps all that is needed is an effective
criminal statute against hoarding of, and speculation in, foodstuffs.
These considerations greatly narrow the philosophical gap between
those who, like many Western governments, want to highlight civil
35
Being negative, this duty is of considerably greater weight than any positive duty we
may have to seek to improve the conditions of those upon whom such an order is imposed
by others without our collaboration.
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 65
and political rights and those who, like most socialist and developing
states, want to single out social, economic and cultural rights for special
emphasis. Let me now show how the institutional understanding of
human rights would also greatly reduce the practical signicance of such
controversies.
Suppose that only civil and political human rights are worthy of
the name, that the social, economic and cultural rights set forth in the
Universal Declaration (foremost, of course, the much ridiculed right
to periodic holidays with pay of 24) should hence be repudiated.
Conjoining this view with the institutional understanding of human rights,
we get the moral assertion that every human being is entitled to an interna-
tional order in which his or her civil and political human rights can be fully
realized. Our global order falls far short in this respect, and does so largely
on account of the extreme poverty and inequality it reproduces: In most
developing countries, the legal rights of ordinary citizens cannot be effec-
tively enforced. For many of these countries are so poor that they cannot
afford properly trained judges and police forces in sufcient numbers; and
in many of them social institutions as well as politicians, ofcials and
government agencies are in any case (partly through foreign inuences) so
thoroughly corrupted that the fulllment of civil and political human rights
is not even seriously attempted. In those few developing countries where
the legal rights of ordinary citizens can be effectively enforced, too many
citizens are under too much economic pressure, too dependent on others,
or too uneducated to work on the enforcement of their rights. Thus, even
the goal of fullling only the recognized civil and political human rights
if only they were interpreted in the light of 28 sufces to support the
demand for global institutional reforms that would reduce global poverty
and inequality.
Or suppose that only social, economic and cultural human rights are
worthy of the name. Conjoining this view with my reading of 28, we
get the moral assertion that every human being is entitled to an inter-
national order in which his or her social, economic and cultural human
rights can be fully realized. Our global order falls far short in this respect:
More than one billion persons today live in abject poverty, without the
most elementary education and health care, and without reserves for even
a minor emergency. Several ten thousand of them, mainly children and
women, die every day from malnutrition and easily curable diseases. This
suffering is in large part due to the fact that the global poor live under
governments that mostly do very little to alleviate their deprivations and
often even contribute to them. The global poor are dispersed over some
150 states, which are ruled, mostly, not by general and public laws, but
66 THOMAS POGGE
by powerful persons and groups (dictators, party bosses, military ofcers,
landlords), often sponsored or supported from abroad. In such states, they
are unable to organize themselves freely, to publicize their plight, or to
work for reform through the political or legal system. Thus, even the goal
of fullling only the usual social and economic human rights if only
they were interpreted in the light of 28 sufces to support the call for a
global order that would strongly encourage the incorporation of effective
civil and political rights into national constitutions.
36
I certainly did not mean to contend, in this section, that it makes no
difference which rights we single out as human rights. I merely wanted to
show that both the philosophical and practical-political importance of the
actual controversies about this question would diminish, if human rights
were understood not in the conventional sense, but in mine: as moral
claims on social institutions. Even if we have rather diverse views about
which goods should be placed under the protection of a conception of
human rights, we will then provided we really care about the fulllment
36
A global order could give such encouragement through centrally determined
economic (trade, loans, GRD payments) and diplomatic privileges and penalties. Stronger
sanctions, like embargoes and military interventions, should probably be triggered only in
cases of extreme oppression.
Some of the governments that profess allegiance solely to social, economic and cultural
human rights maintain that (legal) civil and political rights are currently unnecessary in
their country: unhelpful, or even counterproductive (distracting and expensive). But most
of these governments would, I believe, concede that more extensive civil and political rights
would often be helpful elsewhere or at other times. The Chinese government, for example,
would certainly maintain that instituting more extensive civil and political rights in China
today would not work to the benet of the Chinese poor, for whom the Party and the
government are already doing all they can. But the same government might acknowledge,
if only unofcially, that there are other regions today Africa, perhaps, or Latin America,
Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Indonesia where more extensive civil and
political rights would help the poor and ethnic minorities to fend for themselves. Even more
privately, it would probably also have to concede that the Chinese famine of 19581961,
whose staggering death toll of nearly 30 million has become widely known only recently,
could not have occurred in a country with independent mass media and a competitive
political system. Compare an analogous domestic case. A decent police ofcer, who cares
deeply about the suffering caused by crime, may see no good reason why she and her fellow
ofcers at her station should not just do everything they can to nail a suspect they know to
be guilty, without regard to procedural niceties. But would she also advocate a civil order
in which the police in general can operate without procedural encumbrances? She must
surely understand that not all ofcers would always use their greater powers in a decent,
fair and judicious fashion, and also that some persons with criminal intentions would then
have much greater incentives to try to join the police force. This example shows that one
may consistently believe of certain safeguards that their observance should be strongly
encouraged by social institutions and that they are unnecessary or even counterproductive
in this or that particular case.
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 67
of human rights, and not about ideological propaganda victories work
together on the same institutional reforms rather than argue over how much
praise or blame is deserved by this state or that.
VI
The other important advantage of the institutional understanding lies in its
profound implications for the debate about the universal validity of human
rights. One often hears that human rights are the expression of a provin-
cial, i.e., European, moral conception whose worldwide imposition would
manifest a new form of imperialism: Do not the Chinese, the Indians
and the Zulus have traditions of their own from which they can construct
their own moral conception perhaps wholly without the individualistic
concept of rights? If you Westerners want to make a conception of human
rights the centerpiece of your political philosophy and realize it in your
political institutions, then go ahead, by all means. But do leave others the
same freedom to dene their values within the context of their own culture
and national discourse.
Even if such admonitions are often put forward in bad faith,
37
they
nevertheless require a reasoned response. Once human rights are viewed
as moral claims on global institutions, a novel and much more plausible
such response becomes available, as follows: When we think of human
rights as a standard for assessing only national institutions and/or govern-
ments, then it makes sense to envision a plurality of standards for states
that differ in their history, culture, population size and density, natural
environment, geopolitical context and stage of development. But when we
think of human rights as a standard for assessing global institutions, we can
no longer accommodate international diversity in this way. There can be,
at any given time, only one global institutional order. If it is to be possible
to justify this global order to persons in all parts of the world and also
to reach agreement on how they should be adjusted and reformed in the
light of new experience or changed circumstances, then we must aspire to
a single, universal standard which all persons and peoples of this world
can accept as the basis for moral judgments about our global order.
Attaining such a common standard for assessing shared social institu-
tions does not presuppose thoroughgoing agreement on all or even most
37
As when we were told by Ernest Lef` evre, former US President Ronald Reagans
candidate for Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, that torture is an accepted
part of Argentinean culture or still are told by other Westerners that child prostitution is
essential to the Thai way of life.
68 THOMAS POGGE
moral issues. It may merely demand that global institutions be so designed
that, as far as possible, everyone has secure access to a few goods that
are vital to all human beings. Now it is true that designing social institu-
tions with an eye to a few key values will have collateral effects on the
prevalence of other values. Global institutions designed to encourage the
fulllment of human rights may affect the cultural life in various societies
or the popularity of the various religions. But this problem of collateral
effects is simply unavoidable: Any institutional order can be criticized on
the grounds that some values do not optimally thrive in it. Yet, we can
mitigate the problem by choosing our moral standard in such a way that
the institutional order it favors will allow a wide range of values to thrive
locally. The standard of human rights meets this condition, because it can
be fullled in a wide range of countries that differ greatly in their culture,
traditions and national institutions.
The crucial thought here is this: Once we view human rights as moral
claims on global institutions, there simply is no attractive, tolerant and
pluralistic alternative to conceiving them as valid universally. While the
world can contain societies that are structured in a variety of ways, some
liberal and some not, it cannot itself be structured in a variety of ways. If
the Algerians want their society to be organized as a religious state and we
want ours to be a liberal democracy, we can both have our way.
38
But if the
Algerians want global institutions to be designed on the basis of the Koran
and we want them to render secure the objects of human rights for all,
then we cannot both have our way. With respect to our global institutional
order, one conception will necessarily prevail through reason or force.
There is no room for accommodation here, and, if we really care about
human rights, then we must be willing to support the global order they
favor, even against those who, perhaps by appeal to other values, support
an alternative world order in which the objects of human rights would be
less secure.
We might, of course, understand human rights as a standard for
assessing only national (institutions and) governments and then accept that
other states use other such standards. But such modesty is pointless.
For we cannot behave neutrally with regard to the future development of
the global institutional order. Our political and economic decisions will
certainly co-determine its development. It is, for the future of humankind,
the most important and most urgent task of our time to set this develop-
ment upon an acceptable path. It would be entirely irresponsible to deprive
38
Mutual toleration with regard to this question is at least possible. This is not to say
that we ought to tolerate the national institutions of other countries no matter how unjust
they may be.
THE INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 69
ourselves of any moral basis for the assessment and reform of our global
order. And the only such basis that could be both plausible and capable of
wide international acceptance today is a conception of human rights.
VII
According to a widely held opinion, the content of international law
is settled by actual government conduct and rhetoric as recorded and
interpreted by the foremost international lawyers. By that criterion, my
explication of 28 and my theses about the concept and reach of human
rights may well be far-fetched. But my ambition here was not to satisfy
that criterion but rather to keep alive, against the living examples of
actual government conduct and rhetoric, an understanding of human rights
as moral claims on global institutions. Though marginalized, this under-
standing is no less compelling today than it was fty years ago. And it
does not rule out viewing human rights also as moral claims on national
institutions and on the conduct of governments and their ofcials.
Department of Philosophy
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027
USA
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