Global Justice, Poverty and the International Economic Order

What principles of justice ought to guide the evolution of international economic law? In his essay for this volume, Thomas Pogge argues that there is a moral duty on the part of affluent countries not to contribute to the design of a ‘global economic order that, continually and forseeably, produces vast excesses of severe poverty and premature poverty-related deaths’.1 According to Pogge, the existing international economic order represents a violation of this duty, and this violation, which is a human rights violation, leads to an obligation to compensate the world’s poor through, inter alia, foreign aid. Pogge suggests: In the modern world, the traffic of international and even intra-national economic…