Reviving the Right of Necessity

As I write these lines, in 2015, 836 million people live with less than 1.25 dollars a day. Seven hundred ninety-five million people (that is, one in nine people on earth) do not have enough food to lead a healthy, active life. Seven hundred fifty million people lack access to clean water, and 16,000 children under the age of five die each day due to preventable causes like diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia. At the same time, wealth inequality worldwide has been on the rise since the 2008 economic crisis. Currently, it is estimated that the richest 1 percent of adult wealth holders now own half of all household wealth, reaching levels not seen for almost a century.

The first four statistics are enough to give a flavour of the scale of world poverty today and the high toll it takes on human lives. The last one, related to global wealth inequality, points to the huge gap between the realities of those in need and those who have resources in abundance. All together, they constitute the raw material from which a growing number of moral and political theorists have posed the question of what moral duties, if any, affluent countries and individuals owe to the poor.

Because of their influence and pervasiveness in this debate, in what follows I focus my analysis on a particular strand of analytic political theorists — namely, moral cosmopolitans. Broadly construed, moral cosmopolitanism aims at diminishing human suffering and at respecting and promoting human rights and justice on a global scale, starting from three assumptions: that individual human beings are the ultimate unit of moral concern (individuality); that this status attaches to every human being equally (universality), and that this status is to be acknowledged by everyone else (generality). Without fear of oversimplifying, I suggest that the answers of moral cosmopolitans to the above question could be classified in two main groups, depending on which kind of duties are emphasised.

On the one hand, what I hereafter call justice cosmopolitans answer the question from a global justice perspective. As Thomas Pogge, one of its most prominent exponents, explains, the focus of this view is 'the causal and moral analysis of the global institutional order against the background of its feasible and reachable alternatives'. To design and redesign international and supranational institutions so that they do not cause insecure access to the objects of basic human rights in a foreseeable and avoidable way is the goal of this position, inspired by Rawls's conception of justice as the first virtue of social institutions. The implication is that those who are better-off under the current global structure, and especially those who have greater influence and bargaining power, have above all negative duties not to support or participate in the creation of global institutional arrangements that uphold injustice, and not to contribute to, or profit from, them.

In Pogge's view, the coercive social institutions that constitute the global order are directly responsible for the unfulfiled human rights of the poor, while all individuals who participate in it are indirect contributors, and should stop being so. It is thus assumed that there is a causal, though indirect, link between the plight of the needy and the actions of all those involved in the imposition of such institutions — where involvement is understood in a broad way.

On the other hand, assistance cosmopolitans, as I tag them from now on, emphasise assistance as the main moral duty that the global affluent owe to the global poor. Where justice cosmopolitans trace causal connections between the actions of the wealthy and the plight of the needy in order to ground the duties of the former, assistance cosmopolitans simply look at the jaw-dropping economic and social inequalities in the world today and conclude that those who are in a position to aid are failing to do enough to diminish the total amount of suffering. For Peter Singer, the most prominent assistance cosmopolitan, there are no excuses to go on failing on this duty, especially given at what little cost the better-off could actually make a positive difference. He formulates his argument for an obligation to assist thus: 'If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so'. Considering, as he claims, that never before has the world seen so many rich people ('there are about a billion living at a level of affluence never previously known except in the courts of kings and nobles'), saving the lives of the more than two billion living in abject poverty is presented as a relatively cheap moral task, and makes it all the more appalling not to do something about it.

Depending on what they think is the minimum morally required from those in a position to help (in terms of money, time and effort), assistance cosmopolitans range from those who demand that agents change their current ways of living dramatically, to those who argue for a more moderate duty to help the poor that is to be balanced against other important moral considerations — for example, personal projects and relationships. In general, assistance cosmopolitans propose that this positive duty to aid should be exercised mainly through governmental and nongovernmental agencies, while some seek the institutionalisation of aid at the supra-national level, via some sort of global taxation.

This is an extremely succinct presentation of the positions of justice and assistance cosmopolitans. It should be enough, however, to restate the point made at the beginning: despite the different justifications offered, both sides focus on what the well-off are doing that has a detrimental impact on the lives of those in need, or on what the well-off are failing to do that would have a beneficial impact on them, and, thence, on the duties derived. Furthermore, even when the suggestion is that the world's rich are violating the human rights of billions, the conclusion is that we, the lucky ones (and, not surprisingly, moral and political theorists always fall on this side of the division), ought to fix the problem by upholding our duties of justice or assistance, or both.

In this book, I focus on the other side of the coin — that is, I focus on what having a human right to subsistence actually and practically means for their holders, and on what actions it allows them to undertake when it remains unfulfiled. That is, my main interest is on what the needy may be morally permitted to do by themselves and for themselves to fulfil or satisfy their basic right to subsistence,...