Global poverty and responsibility: Identifying the duty-bearers of human rights

Global Poverty and Responsibility: Identifying the Duty-Bearers of Human Rights

Abigail Gosselin

Many rights theorists argue that global poverty violates certain human rights, so that responsibility to address poverty involves carrying out the duties that correspond with relevant rights-claims. Libertarians argue that the rights and duties associated with global poverty, especially what are sometimes thought of as "positive" rights, or rights of assistance, are inappropriately agent-neutral, giving them less justificatory force than agent-relative rights and duties. To counter libertarian concerns, Thomas Pogge tries to reframe the responsibilities corresponding to human rights as institutional rather than as belonging to agents. While admirable, his approach inadequately explains the relationships between institutional responsibility and individual and collective action. A better way to respond to libertarian concerns--that is also compatible with Pogge's emphasis on institutional responsibility--is to show that the duties regarding global poverty are indeed agent-relative, but by virtue of individual and collective action within institutions.

Introduction

Many rights theorists argue that global poverty violates certain human rights, so that responsibility to address poverty involves carrying out the duties that correspond with relevant rights-claims. There is much controversy, however, about what the appropriate objects of human rights are and what agents are morally required to fulfill them. One set of objections to situating the responsibility for global poverty within the human rights framework concerns the nature of relevant rights as agent-neutral or agent-relative. Libertarians argue that the rights and duties associated with global poverty, especially what are sometimes thought of as "positive" rights or rights of assistance, are inappropriately agent-neutral, giving them less justificatory force than agent-relative rights and duties.

To counter libertarian concerns, and to transcend debates about which agents are responsible for what, Thomas Pogge tries to reframe the responsibilities corresponding to human rights as institutional rather than as belonging to agents. While admirable, his approach inadequately explains the relationships between institutional responsibility and individual and collective action. A better way to respond to libertarian concerns--that is also compatible with Pogge's emphasis on institutional responsibility--is to show that the duties regarding global poverty are indeed agent-relative, but by virtue of individual and collective action within

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institutions. Thus the agent-relative aspect of duties corresponding to human rights is relative to the individuals who make these claims only indirectly; they are directly relative to the specific institutions under which individuals make their rights claims and under which individual and collective agents act.

Distinctions in Duties

Debates about rights have typically centered on a perceived distinction between what are often called "negative" and "positive" rights. To the extent that such a distinction is valid, duties entailed by human rights are of two general kinds, involving different responses that duty-bearers are morally required to make. The difference between the two categories of rights and duties can be understood in terms of how they each understand what constitutes freedom. Which rights have the most normative significance depends on which conception of freedom is considered paramount and therefore deserving of the protection that rights confer. Philosophers who prioritize one form of freedom over another accordingly value one kind of right over another, thus fueling debates about what are the objects of rights and who has duties to fulfill them.

There are two primary meanings that freedom can have, sometimes seen as op- posing each other. Freedom can mean non-interference, so that a person is free if no one coerces or manipulates her to act otherwise than as she chooses. The rights associated with non-interference are what Wesley Hohfeld termed bare liberties or powers ~ and what contemporary philosophers sometimes call negative rights. Nega- tive rights correspond with what the United Nations recognizes as civil and political rights3 These are rights to be able to act as one desires, within some limits (namely, not infringing on others' same fights). Philosophers also sometimes call these liberty or security fights, in that their purpose is to protect people's interests and liberty. 3 Examples of these rights include freedom of speech or freedom of assembly.

Negative rights imply that duty-bearers have negative duties to let people (i.e., right-claimants) act as they wish, given the bounds expressed by the fights. Negative duties are those duties that people can fulfill simply by not acting, by omission or refraining from action. When agents do infringe upon others' negative fights--in other words, they interfere when they should not, as expressed by the bounds of the r ight--and they do so wrongfully--meaning that, all things considered, they do not have justification to do so-- then their violation causes wrongful harm. When this occurs, agents have duties to redress the wrongful harm they have caused, or to right the wrong. 4 In the negative rights framework, therefore, agents have agent-neutral duties to prevent wrongful harm from occurring by refraining from violating people's rights of non-interference. If agents do infringe on people's rights, they then have agent-relative duties to rectify the wrongful harm they have caused.

Freedom can also mean having the resources and ability to do as one chooses. The concern here is not avoiding coercion, but rather having sufficient means so that one has the ability to act. The rights associated with this freedom are what Hohfeld

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termed claims or what contemporary philosophers sometimes call positive rights. Positive rights correspond with what the United Nations recognizes as economic, social, and cultural rights, 5 which are rights to specific resources that enable one to act. Philosophers sometimes call these welfare or subsistence rights, emphasizing the goods that humans need in order to survive or thrive. 6 Examples of these rights include the fight to food or the right to adequate physical and mental health.

Positive rights imply that duty-bearers have positive duties to provide the resources expressed by the rights. Positive duties are commonly understood to involve active intervention, or some use of "force," rather than the inaction involved with refraining. Agents must do something in order to provide assistance and fulfill their duties. As a result, agents are responsible for both their actions and omissions, since they are responsible for not meeting people's rights as much as they are responsible for doing so.

Duties and rights are agent-neutral when they apply to any or all agents impar- tially. Agent-neutral duties are universal in scope, directed toward any and all people who make the relevant rights-claims. In contrast, duties and rights are agent-relative when they apply to particular agents for specific (justifying) reasons. Agent-relative duties are local and specific in scope, not necessarily partial--in other words, based on relationships of "closeness"7--but they are at least particular--based on some specific, morally relevant relationships, such as those that form when one enters into contract agreements. Another way to understand this distinction is that agent-neutral duties are cosmopolitan obligations, while agent-relative duties are special obligations.

Libertarians support agent-neutral duties of non-intervention (in other words, we have duties to respect everyone's liberties) and agent-relative duties of assistance (for example, I have duties to aid those with whom I enter into contracts, or those with whom I have otherwise special relationships such as my children). What libertarians object to is agent-neutral duties of assistance. 8 In order for duties of assistance to be acceptable to libertarians, particular duty-bearers must be identifiable for specific justifying reasons.

Many philosophers simply argue that libertarian reasons for prioritizing special obligations are misguided. But these concerns are worth taking seriously. Although I do not wish to defend libertarianism, I do agree with Thomas Pogge that the strongest models of responsibility are those that are acceptable within the widest variety of political frameworks. In order for duties regarding global poverty to be more strongly justified, or at least more acceptable within political frameworks, they must be able to take into account libertarian concerns about the priority of agent-relative obligations.

Libertarians support duties of assistance only if they are agent-relative, because the reasons that ground agent-relative duties are more widely convincing than those grounding agent-neutral duties. Because duties infringe on individuals' liberties to do as they wish, libertarians require a more stringent argument for the existence of particular duties than most non-libertarians do. Duties that allow others to do as


they wish encourage the propagation of more liberty. While non-libertarians may argue that duties regarding subsistence also promote freedom, libertarians are not easily convinced that the freedom gained by receiving assistance is worth the cost of freedom to provide it. Many philosophers have attacked libertarians on this very issue, providing arguments to try to disprove these convictions .9 Rather than arguing in this way, I think it is more productive to figure out how responsibility regarding global poverty can fit within the libertarian framework. Global responsibility that is acceptable to libertarians involves agent-relative duties that specify particular duty-bearers for particular justifying (i.e., non-arbitrary) reasons.

Individual Agents as Duty-Bearers

Within the human rights framework, responsibility to address global poverty involves carrying out the duties that human rights entail. Entailment describes a morally binding relationship that justifies particular responses that agents are obligated to make. These morally required responses are what we call duties, and their relationship of entailment to rights is what gives them their normative force. In other words, human rights entail duties that other agents are obligated to carry out in order to meet the rights of claimants.

Another way to understand human rights is as claims held against others. Usu- ally the "others" are thought to be other agents, so that individuals make human rights claims against duty-bearers who act as agents in carrying out their duties in response to these claims. Defining agency here is beyond the scope of this paper, but in general an agent has some degree of control over the choices she/he/it makes and her/his/its ability to carry out action; an agent also has the capability to make claims by identifying and communicating them. Just as agents may be individual or collective, duty-bearers may also be individuals or collectives.

Traditionally rights and duties are held between individuals, as it is thought that individual human beings are the appropriate candidates for being able to claim a right and also are appropriate agents for fulfilling duties. The entailment between rights and their corresponding duties is a quasi-logical relationship between particular right-claimants and duty-bearers. A useful way of conceptualizing the elements of a right and their relationship with each other is in terms of Alan Gewirth's formula: A has a right to X against B by virtue of Y, where A is the subject (or right-claim- ant), the right is the nature of the relationship, X is the object of the right, B is the respondent (or duty-holder), and Y is the right's justifying basis or reason. 1~ As a result of such an entailment relationship, justifying reasons are necessary to explain why particular individuals are appropriate candidates for claiming rights and for fulfilling duties.

Libertarians use this conception of entailment to argue that certain human rights, namely rights of assistance, are logically incoherent and therefore meaningless. The problem with making human rights claims against individual duty-bearers is that the formulations of human rights do not specify against whom they are held, so it

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appears that they are "generic" fights "held against the world. ''11 This appearance of generality results from the universality of human fights, in that human rights are claimed universally by all humans. Assuming that rights and duties correspond strictly, libertarians conclude from the universality of rights-claimants that the duty- bearers responsible for meeting human fights are also universal or cosmopolitan in scope.

The result of this seeming universality of duty is that certain kinds of human rights cannot exist, because their universality presents a logical incoherence. The rights that would be precluded are "positive" rights of assistance, such as the fight to food. The argument against the universality of positive rights is that not all agents can do something to respond to human rights involving assistance, even if they can claim rights and be beneficiaries of a duty. Any one agent, whether governmental or not, cannot possibly meet all people's needs in an adequate or even fair and equal way. 12 For example, Jan Narveson objects that i fN people are hungry, and they have a right to food, then any single individual has a duty to provide a share of that food, say 1/Nth. 13 The problem is that such as duty is ambiguous and unenforceable, and ultimately absurd. 14

Evaluation of Individuals as Duty-Bearers

There are three points I want to make in response, all regarding the vagueness of human rights and their corresponding duties. First, insofar as the distinction between negative and positive duties is valid, this distinction does not necessarily imply a corresponding distinction between negative and positive action as involved in carrying out a duty. Rather, it just suggests that the actions required by any duty must be specified more clearly so that they are meaningful, reasonable, and enforceable. In addition, the agents who are responsible for meeting human fights should also be identified more specifically.

With respect to the first point, I am agnostic about the significance of this distinction between "negative" and "positive" rights and duties, and how different kinds of rights relate to each other logically. What I want to point out here is that what counts in each category as "negative" and "positive" rights require both action and omission in order to fulfill one's duties in meeting people's rights. For example, the "negative" duty not to torture may require a positive, forceful action of stopping others from torturing--or even stopping one's own impulse to torture. Similarly, the "positive" duty to provide assistance may mean passively letting someone use resources rather than "forcefully" giving them to her. 15 There may be some meaningful distinction between positive and negative duties as they correspond to welfare and liberty rights, but any such distinction does not map onto a metaphysical distinction between different kinds of action, including "active" and "passive" action, acts and omissions/inactions, or "doing" and "allowing." Insofar as rights of assistance are "positive" rights, their duties require actions that fall under all categories of action descriptions including those listed.


A critic might object that stopping oneself or others from torturing does not describe the duty not to torture but rather a different duty such as the duty to rescue or the duty not to act on immoral impulses. Yet such a fine-tuned description of the action that counts as a particular duty does not adequately capture what a duty is. A duty is not a simple moral rule but rather a general complex involving multiple descriptions of actions and omissions. The right not to be tortured entails that another does not inflict torture oneself, and that she prevent torture from occurring when she is able. The duty that corresponds with this right is a complicated, multifaceted moral demand that includes many related actions and omissions that enable one to fulfill the general duty.

Second, while libertarians use the vagueness of human rights to argue that positive rights of assistance are logically incoherent, this conclusion does not necessarily follow. If we have independent arguments for rights of assistance, ~6 then the libertarian argument only shows that human rights are currently expressed too vaguely to be meaningful or action-guiding, allowing room to make false assumptions about how they should be met and by whom. The potential problem of absurdity about the universality of duty that corresponds to human rights only shows that human rights must be described more specifically to identify particular duty-bearers responsible for fulfilling them.

Finally, a consequentialist might respond to Narveson's argument that everyone who is able--but only those who are able--has a duty to help meet people's rights to the best of her ability, making the universality of duty coherent and not absurd. In this case, which agents are able to help fulfill rights is of central importance. These duties may be agent-relative rather than agent-neutral if there are specific, morally binding, and necessary (rather than arbitrary) reasons that justify response by particular agents. Since individuals do not have nearly the ability to fulfill duties as collectives, the candidates for these duty-bearers are most likely not individu- a l s -no r need they be, since there is nothing involved with the concept of rights that requires such symmetry between rights-claimants and duty-bearers. I explain this in more depth in the next section.

Collective Agents as Duty-Bearers

In order for rights to be meaningful, the particular agents responsible for carrying out their corresponding duties must be identified. Human rights of assistance do not imply some universality of duty-bearers, for the fact that all humans may claim rights does not imply that all humans have duties that correlate with them. Nor does this universality of need or interest imply that the appropriate duty-bearers should be individual humans, even if individual humans are the appropriate candidates for right-claimants, for there is nothing logically entailed by the kind of candidates eligible for claiming that implies anything about the kind of candidates required for fulfilling duties. The fact that individuals can claim human rights does not require that individuals, or even humans, are the necessary or appropriate duty-bearers.

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Most political philosophers believe that the appropriate agents of responsibility for certain human rights, particularly those associated with assistance, are collective agents. These collective agents include governments (public, political bodies), non- governmental organizations (associations operating in the sphere of civil society), or corporations (private economic bodies). In order to be agents, collectives must meet the requirements for agency, such as having the abilities to make choices, to carry out action, and to identify and communicate claims, interests, or needs2 7 Collectives that meet these conditions are what Peter French calls "conglomerates," characterized by having decision-making and action-delegating procedures that allow them to choose and act as agents in the relevant way. 18

There are two reasons for locating responsibility for meeting human rights in collectives. First, this serves a prudential purpose, in that collectives are better able to fill these duties. They have greater resources, more "arms" with which to act (i.e., individuals occupying roles within them and therefore able to act on their behalf), and more "heads" to share ideas in trying to acquire more knowledge and make better decisions. Second, focusing on collective agents is politically justified, since the role of many collectives, including governments, is to provide access and security to certain goods, as Onora O'Neill argues. ~9

O'Neill agrees with libertarian concerns that generic or vague rights are empty. 2~ In order to be meaningful, human rights must be specific enough to identify agents of responsibility. O'Neill does not believe that such specific rights are ultimately justifiable, however. We usually prefer using rights language because "entitlements have more immediate charm than duties, ''21 but she believes that specific duties are better justified than specific rights.

Obligations can be justified using the hypothetical universalization of Kantian practical reasoning. Reasons for obligations must be justifiable to all in the relevant domain, meaning they must be acceptable, followable, and action-guiding to all whom they concern. Duties of aid are special perfect obligations, held by some and owed to specific others, determined by specific actions and relations. 22 Their existence requires that collective agents, or agencies, must be designed specifically to meet them, particularly public agencies such as government agencies and non- governmental organizations.

Evaluation of Collectives as Duty-Bearers

There are at least two problems with the proposal to design agencies with the express purpose of meeting people's needs. One objection is aimed specifically at O'Neill 's account, regarding the applicability of Kantian justifications of duty to collectives. While obligations of individuals may be justified in Kantian terms, it is not clear whether those of collectives can be. Individual obligations may be justified on Kantian grounds, universalizing from one's own needs, such as for freedom and well-being. 23 The end result is that whatever I need from others, I must also provide for them. This kind of reasoning does not work with collectives, however, since


collectives do not engage in the kind of reciprocity between rights and duties that individuals do. This is because collectives are not agents in Kant's sense of the word. Since they can be designed for specific purposes such as to meet individual human rights, collectives can be treated as means only, which means they are not agents in the way that humans are. For Kant, agents capable of rationality and morality must always be treated as ends. Since collectives are not agents, any obligations they have are derivative on the agents who can make demands or claims against them. Thus what justifies collective obligations is the existence of rights and the need for specific agents to fulfill them. O'Neill is right that specific collectives should be designed to provide and protect goods needed by humans, but what justifies this protection is the existence of rights, not a universalization of obligations.

A second problem regards the justification of impartial duties of assistance more generally. O'Neill neatly avoids the problems involved with attributing impartial duties of assistance to individuals by assigning them to collectives. The strength of her proposal to design collectives expressly for this purpose, is that it helps answer libertarian objections to individual duties of assistance as presented above. Yet libertarians will be unsatisfied by this response, for it inadequately addresses their deeper concerns about the distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative duties.

Designing agents for the express purpose of meeting "positive" human fights of assistance is one way to identify their appropriate duty-bearers. But this approach makes questionable assumptions about the nature of harm that unfulfilled human rights represent. Designing agents that are able to provide assistance on account of having greater means to do so disregards the moral relevance of any causal contribution to harm. In this view, what makes poverty a condition of harm is that it is merely a bad state of affairs, independent of how such a state came about. Global political and economic institutions are assumed to operate in generally just ways, or at least they constitute "normal" background conditions that can be accepted unquestioningly. 24 Given these background conditions, some people just happen to be unfortunate in receiving bad treatment, or in lacking needed goods. For example, when famine results from natural disaster like drought, this is seen as accidental or unfortunate, as a matter of (bad) luck in a generally just---or at least not un- j u s t - w o r l d . In this understanding of harm, no particular individual or collective agent is liable for causing the suffering or neediness that give rise to the claims, so no one is responsible for redressing harm.

Since the harm suffered is a matter of luck rather than resulting from individual or collective agency, responsibility is a matter of benevolence rather than liability. Either this responsibility is cosmopolitan in scope, held by all agents and applying to all rights-claimants, or it is based on factors such as having sufficient means. Re- sponsibility as benevolence is problematic to libertarians, however. Besides objecting to cosmopolitan "positive" duties as explained above, libertarians may also argue that responsibility based on possessing resources and abilities is unjustified, for if agents have rightfully earned their means, 25 they deserve them, and they therefore have fights to them. If agents have fights to their own resources, then they are under

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no moral obligation to share them--unless there are justified reasons that override those rights, such as having committed wrongs that entail rectification. Even if global poverty really is merely a bad state of affairs, this understanding of poverty and its resulting responsibility as benevolence is not persuasive to the libertarian. 26

In contrast to viewing poverty as mere harm, it may be seen as a wrongful harm, or a condition that is caused by wrongful action by particular agents who are thereby liable for the harm they caused. Here the lack of necessary goods that constitutes poverty is the result of a causal chain of action to which an agent makes a morally relevant, causal contribution. Responsibility here is agent-relative, as which agents have morally binding, necessary duties to respond depends on whose action con- tributed to the harm in the morally relevant ways. 27 Such duties are local in scope, held by particular agents. Insofar as poverty is a wrongful harm, libertarians and cosmopolitans agree that the particular agents that made morally relevant causal contributions to it have agent-relative duties to rectify it. But much debate remains about to what extent wrongful harm applies to poverty and in what cases.

A third way of understanding what makes poverty a bad state requiring response is as an institutional injustice, as the result of unjust social, political, and economic practices. Here poverty is not wrongfully caused by particular, identifiable agents, but is rather the result of formal policies and informal practices that benefit some and burden others in a systematic and unjust way. While wrongful harm demands corrective justice to fight its wrongs, institutional injustice demands distributive justice to make the distribution of benefits and burdens within social, political, and economic institutions more just. In this conception of poverty, the agents responsible for meeting people's relevant human rights are not necessarily agents at all, but rather institutions. Nonetheless, individual and collective agents participate in the political, economic, and cultural institutions that cause harm. Although particular agents may not act in specific ways that cause identifiable harm, their involvement in institutional practices does constitute causal involvement that may have moral relevance.

Institutions as Duty-Bearers

Political philosophers like Thomas Pogge 28 and Iris Marion Young 29 distinguish between interactional and institutional justice as different spaces in which justice applies, or different "circumstances of justice. ''3~ Interactional justice applies to the way agents, both individual and collective, relate to each other. In the context of human rights, this interaction occurs in the exchange of claims, duties, powers, immunities, etc. between various individuals and agencies as discussed above. In- stitutional justice, on the other hand, applies to the way institutional structures are designed, for they are the frameworks that underlie all interaction between individual humans and collective agents.

An institution is a social practice, set of rules, or other structure that serves as a backdrop for what actions agents are able or expected to take, providing a system


of rewards and punishments that create expectations for behavior and penalties for failing to meet expectations) 1 Institutions govern the interactions between individual and collective agents, and they also structure the access that agents have to material resources. 32 The rules, systems, or practices that institutions describe may be either informal, as general social expectations and practices, or formal, as codi- fied principles and procedures. Since they condition individual action, institutions have a normative function. They are more or less just in the ways that they enable or limit action, and they are capable of being designed accordingly. 33 The norms that construct institutions are not merely descriptive but also normative, and they are capable of being changed, such as to be more just, by the individual and collective agents that act within them. Because institutions have this normative function, justice necessarily applies to them.

Political philosophers typically understand global poverty as a case of institutional or structural injustice. Young defines structural injustice (as she prefers to call it) as vulnerability to harm by virtue of one's social position, or by what place in society one occupies, rather than as an intentional object of unjust practices? 4 Certain people are vulnerable to poverty in ways that other people are not; for example, people who have had farmland taken from them for corporate use, or people who cannot sell their food on the global market because of Western subsidies that encourage over- production and decreased prices. This vulnerability has at least some social causes, and its incidence and correlation with social position is statistically predictable. What makes these injustices s tructural or institutional rather than interpersonal or interactional is that we are unable to blame any particular agents for causing them. After all, what makes structural processes significantly different from interactions between agents is that they describe the conf luence of particular agents' actions, which may or may not be coordinated or intentional. Agents may all act well or at least decently, rather than in blameworthy ways; the ways in which they act m a k e

sense to them given their particular contexts. Yet these contexts or structures are precisely the conditions that constitute injustice for some, and the ways that agents act within these structures contribute to the harms experienced by others.

Because global injustice is constituted more by the way institutional structures condition individual actions than by individual transactions, Thomas Pogge argues that the framework of interactional justice is not useful for addressing issues like poverty. Since global poverty has structural causes such as governmental and corporate policies, it must be addressed at the institutional level. Institutional justice involves reorganizing societies so that individuals can realize their human rights as fully as possible. 35 Pogge defines rights in terms of secure access to goods: "The postulate of a human right to X is tantamount to the demand that, insofar as reasonably possible, any coercive social institutions be so designed that all human brings affected by them have secure access to X. ''36 These goods may be defined "positively" or "negatively," as material goods or as expressions of liberty.

All agents and the institutions under which they act have obligations to ensure secure access to goods, because interactions between (individual and collective)

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agents necessarily occur within structural contexts. Justice must occur in the institutional sphere because only institutions can provide the backdrop for this secure access adequately. Pogge's conception of rights and the duties they entail thus provides support for O'Neill 's argument to create particular agencies that have as their goal the provision of necessary goods and the protection and promotion of particular rights. His focus on institutional justice goes farther than this, however. Even collective agents that do not exist for the purpose of providing secure access to goods have duties to not infringe on the rights people have to these goods. In other words, whether or not they are designed to provide goods (as O'Neill suggests they should be), all agents and the institutional structures in which they act have at least "negative" duties to not interfere with people's secure access to the goods to which they have rights.

Michael J. Green objects to Pogge's claim that institutions violate "negative" duties as overstated. 37 Green uses the term institution differently than Pogge, as he acknowledges, to mean collective agencies such as governments rather than rules or practices. On either meaning, however, his objection does not carry much weight. Any entity with agency is the kind of thing that can have duties, especially duties to refrain from specific action. If collectives have any capacity for agency, then they are capable of "negative" duties) 8 Green wants to confine the application of rights and corresponding duties to individuals, but there is no legitimate reason to do this besides mere tradition or intuition.

Even if institutions mean as Pogge intends, Green's objection is misdirected. In conceiving of institutions as a space where justice applies, Pogge is onto something by trying to account for the lack of agency involved in institutional action to which Green objects. Institutional justice accounts for the way in which institutions are not agents, even though they constitute the conditions in which agents act. Because institutions are not agents, they themselves do not act--and so they cannot perform what philosophers call "positive" actions that are often (justifiably or not) correlated with duties of assistance. But institutions are capable of what philosophers describe as "negative" actions, which are not actions at all, properly speaking, but rather something like inactions, omissions, or "allowings." The relevant kind of"negative" action regarding human rights is the lack of infringement on one's rights. Because no "positive" action is necessary, lack of infringement can occur without agents because it does not require agency, and so structures that are not themselves agents can be spaces in which this lack of infringement occurs.

Pogge's argument for what justice entails is thus persuasive even to the libertarian, for in his account institutions have agent-neutral duties to not interfere with individuals' secure access to the goods to which they have a r ight--which is precisely the kind of "negative" duty that libertarians endorse. Yet this approach requires extensive change in present conditions. Even without taking "positive" actions of providing aid, the "negative" requirement that institutions refrain from interfering with people's secure access to rights requires major changes in existing structures and the ways that individual and collective agents make decisions and act within


them. Duties to provide, protect, and not infringe on people's secure access to goods are significant because present global institutions actively contribute to a good deal of injustice, including global poverty.

Evaluation of Institutions as Duty-Bearers

The agency required to carry out institutional responsibility must still be explained. The problem with locating responsibility for meeting human rights within an institutional space rather than within the locus of human--individual or col- lect ive-act ion is that structures themselves do not have agency. Responsibility is predicated of agents, but institutions are not themselves agents. Some philosophers do in fact write about the agency of institutions as if they are full agents on a par with individuals, 39 but perhaps these philosophers conflate institutions as structures with conglomerate collectives. Attributing real agency to institutions is mistaken.

Institutions are a space in which rights can be claimed, because within this space rights can be infringed upon or upheld--but they are not themselves the agents that do the infringing or upholding. Rather, institutions are comprised of agents that perform the actions that lead to infringing upon or upholding rights. Even within a framework of "negative" action, we need some account of the agency relevant. In order for institutions to avoid infringing upon human rights, agents must act inten- tionally to design or change them to be just in this way. The mystery here is who (which agents) are responsible for guaranteeing institutional justice and why, i.e. what relationships to institutions are morally relevant for grounding this responsibility.

What is significant about the relationship between individual and collective agents and the institutional structures in which they act is that the kind of agency involved is a compromised one. Even as they condition what options are available for action, institutions are constituted by interactions between individual and collective agents. These agents may meet the criteria to be considered full or sufficient agents within their own locus of interaction--but, when their actions are combined with the actions of others in a typically unintended and uncoordinated way, the confluence of actions and the way such actions are carried out may not meet the criteria of full or sufficient agency. This is a problem of understanding agency at different levels. At the micro, individual level, the agents involved have sufficient voluntariness, knowledge, rational decision-making, etc. for their actions to be the actions of agents; at the macro, structural level, the structure itself does not act or create outcomes with sufficient voluntariness, knowledge, rational decision-making, etc. The way that agents act within institutional structures constitutes a strange middle space between pure agent-causation (in which agents have full or sufficient control in producing specific outcomes to be considered an agent or have sufficient agency) and pure event-causation (in which agents play no role or have insufficient control or agency in producing specific outcomes).

While individual and collective agents do act within institutions, it is not their actions qua particular agents that result in harm; rather, it is the confluence of their

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often unintended and uncoordinated actions that result in the harms that give rise to human rights claims. The strange middle space between agent-causation and event- causation is constituted not by agents qua particular individuals or collectives, but rather by agents qua their roles and more generally the positions, which they occupy within structures. Thus the agency required to carry out institutional responsibility, and in particular to meet human rights, is that involved with roles,

Here again, institutional responsibility, particularly as Pogge describes it, is compatible with a libertarian framework of rights and duties. The libertarian, remember, accepts agent-neutral duties as justified only when they are duties of non-interference, or "negative" duties. Duties of assistance are justified in this framework only when they are agent-relative. In Pogge's conception of institutional responsibility, institutions have agent-neutral duties to not interfere with individuals' secure access to the goods to which they have a right. Although institutions are not properly agents, this does have major implications for the agents that live and act under these institutional structures, for it is their actions that comprise institutional practices. Therefore, individual and collective agents also have agent-relative duties to make sure that institutions fulfill their duties of non-interference. These duties are agent-relative because they depend on what roles individuals occupy within particular collectives, and what positions both individuals and collectives occupy under particular institutions. Within this framework, therefore, individuals do not have blanket cosmopolitan duties; they only have duties with respect to the specific roles they occupy within particular collectives and under particular institutions. These roles thus provide the reasons that justify particular agents as duty-bearers, as libertarians require.

Conclusion

Collectives have direct duties to create conditions of justice that fulfill individuals' human rights, including both "positive" duties of providing assistance as well as "negative" duties of not infringing on people's secure access to goods. Institu- tions also must contribute to meeting individuals' human rights, by being just in the "negative" way of not infringing on people's secure access to goods. Yet neither collective agencies nor institutional structures can perform actions or even exist without individuals acting within them. Individuals make decisions on behalf of collectives, and they have differentiated responsibilities with respect to their roles. Therefore, collective obligations require individuals acting in their roles to make decisions about whether and how the collective carries out its duty. Similarly, institutional structures do not exist without individuals acting under them, in confluence with the actions of other agents. While structures are not agents and cannot make decisions or have intentional action, they can be made more or less just depending on the conjunction of agents' actions that constitute them.

Individuals thus have responsibilities by virtue of their roles within collectives as well as with respect to institutional structures. Some of these responsibilities


arise from occupational roles or various group memberships. *~ Individuals also have political responsibilities to state and society, and economic responsibilities with respect to their productive and consumptive lives. All individuals who live in liberal, capitalist democracies act as citizens and consumers, and they have duties to act within these institutional roles responsibly. While government officials and CEOs have greater responsibilities because their roles entail heavier expectations and greater impact of their decisions, ordinary individuals also have some responsibilities with respect to the institutions under which they act.

It is important to note that role occupations and group memberships need not be fully voluntary in order to entail responsibilities. Libertarians stress the significance of choice and voluntary commitment in entailing obligation that has normative force, but the concepts of choice and compliance must be understood as necessarily contextualized. All choices are made within some limited range of options, so all choices are conditioned by empirical factors within particular contexts; yet if people are agents at all, then they make at least s o m e choice in their actions. Individuals may have greater responsibilities, roles, and commitments to the extent that these are undertaken voluntarily but individuals still have some degree of responsibility to those roles and commitments in which they have less choice. Even libertarians will agree that at least some commitments, such as family obligations, may be un- chosen yet still obligatory.

Because individuals have duties with respect to collectives and institutions, and collectives and institutions have duties with respect to individuals, individuals have at least indirect duties to other individuals that correspond to human rights. These duties are "indirect" because they are mediated through the collectives and institutions in which individuals act. Individuals' duties regarding global poverty are thus agent-relative with respect to their roles within collectives and their relationships to various structures. These conclusions suggest that more analysis is required regarding the collective and especially institutional roles that individuals occupy, especially with respect to institutional responsibilities to meet human rights and to address global justice issues like poverty.

Institutional and interactional justices necessarily intersect. In order for structures to be just, the interactions between particular (individual and collective) agents must also be just, and vice versa. The justice in each sphere need not be strictly correlated with that in the other, but they stand in a dynamic relationship with each other. Because individual and collective agents' action is necessary for institutional practice to occur, and because institutions necessarily condition what action individual and collective agents can take, the justice or lack thereof in one sphere necessarily enhances or exacerbates that in the other.

Pogge is only interested in institutional justice, arguing that interactional justice may be necessary for addressing global injustices like poverty but that it is vastly insufficient and that not enough philosophical and public policy attention has been paid to institutional justice. Moreover, he believes that refraining how we think about rights and justice also justifies responsibility for global poverty to libertarians. If

Gosselin 49

justice primarily belongs in the institutional sphere, then we transcend arguments about the nature of"interactional" justice and responsibilities between agents. Thus we can avoid arguments about whether individuals or other particular agents have cosmopolitan duties of assistance to meet people's "positive" human rights. This institutional framework for justice and responsibility more accurately captures what is morally relevant in assessing and specifying the duty-bearers entailed by the human rights relevant to global poverty.

While Pogge is right to stress the relevance and importance of institutional justice, interactional justice is also necessary. Although he does acknowledge this, his distinction between the two concepts clouds the relations between them. Focus- ing merely on institutional justice fails to account for the agency that institutional responsibility requires for it to be carried out meaningfully. Moreover, specifying the relationship between the two spheres of justice, rather than emphasizing one at the expense of the other, actually addresses libertarian concerns more thoroughly. Libertarians accept agent-neutral duties that are duties of non-interference, and in Pogge's framework of justice this is exactly the kind of responsibility institutions have. Libertarians also accept duties of assistance as long as they are agent-relative, based on reasons that justify the response of particular agents. Collective and institutional roles provide agent-relative reasons for individuals and other agents to carry out both "negative" and "positive" duties, including those duties that correspond to broader institutional responsibilities.

Rather than conceptualizing justice as involving exclusively or primarily rights of individuals and "negative" duties of institutions, as under Pogge's institutional model, or of rights of individuals and duties of either individuals or collectives, as under the interactional model, we should understand global justice as combining the two concepts. The human rights that individuals have entail specific, differentiated duties to be carried out by institutions, collectives, and individuals. In other words, because of the necessary interrelation between individuals, collectives, and institutions, individuals have rights against collectives and institutions as well as duties toward both of them. While duties of non-interference require action (or omission) by all agents, duties of assistance require action primarily of institutions. But individuals also have agent-relative "positive" duties to meet the human rights of other individuals in an indirect way, by acting within their differentiated collective and institutional roles.

Notes

1. Contemporary theories of rights draw upon distinctions made by Wesley Hohfeld (1919) between four meanings of rights: as a bare liberty, a claim, a power, or an immunity. Hohfeld's discussion of rights refers largely to the legal meaning of rights, but it is also relevant to understanding which moral rights are justified and why. A bare liberty or privilege means that a person has no duty not

to do something, in other words no one can justifiably refrain her from acting in a certain way. A claim is something that a person holds against others that others must, morally and legally, let her do or have. A power is an ability to change existing legal arrangements, while an immunity protects a person from such legal changes. A claim by person A against person B entails that


B has a duty to A, while a privilege by A entails that B and others can have no claim over A. A power of A over B means that B is liable to A, while an immunity of A from B entails that B has a disability regarding A. The opposite of a claim is not having a claim; the opposite of a privilege is having a duty. The opposite of power is disability, while the opposite of immunity is liability. See W.N. Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions (New York: Yale University, 1919), and the discussions in Jeremy Waldron, "Introduction," in J. Waldron (ed.), Theories of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 6-7; Carl Wellman, A Theory of Rights: Persons UnderLaws, Institutions, and Morals (Totowa, N J: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), pp. 17-60.

2. "United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)," in M.R. Ishay (ed.), The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Writings, Essays, Speeches, and Documents from the Bible to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 407-412; "United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966)," in M.R. Ishay, The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Writings, Essays, Speeches, and Documents from the Bible to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 424-432.

3. Rodney Peffer, "World Hunger, Moral Theory, and Radical Rawlsianism," International Journal of Politics and Ethics 2(4) (March 2003); Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy, Second Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 36- 37.

4. For a detailed explanation of the relationship between rights and wrongs, and how causation of wrongful harm entails duties of rectification, see Jules Coleman, Risks and Wrongs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); or Joel Feinberg, Harm to Others: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Volume One (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

5. "United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966)" in M. R. Ishay (ed.), The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Writings, Essays, Speeches, and Documents from the Bible to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 433-440. See also James W. Nickel, 1996, "A Human Rights Approach to World Hunger," in W. Aiken and H. La- Follette (eds.), World Hunger and Morality: Second Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), p. 175; Alison M. Jaggar, "Challenging Women's Global Inequalities: Some Priorities for Western Philosophers," Philosophical Topics 30(2)(Fall 2002), p. 232 and footnote 6.

6. Peffer, "World Hunger, Moral Theory, and Radical Ralwsianism"; Shue, Basic Rights, pp. 36- 37.

7. For a discussion of what "closeness" may mean, see Rudiger Bittner, "Morality and World Hun- ger," in T. Pogge (ed.), Global Justice (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), pp. 24-31.

8. It is worth noting that some communitarian objections are parallel to the libertarian objections I focus on here. Although the two political views are not identical and not fully compatible with each other, they both prioritize "special" obligations over impartial, universal ones. For communitar- ians, these special obligations are partial, based on some notion of "closeness"; for libertarians, special obligations may include partial duties, but also and more crucially those responsibilities that arise on account of entering relationships with particular others such as by voluntary contracts or causation of harm. Because my interest is to address concerns about particularity, not partiality, this paper focuses on libertarian objections, but it is worth noting the overlap with communitarian objections with respect to the cosmopolitan scope of certain duties.

9. E.g., Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Second Edition (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003); Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justifica- tion and Applications (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Shue, Basic Rights.

10. Gewirth, Human Rights, p. 2; Alan Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago and London: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1978).

11. Wellman, A Theory of Rights, pp. 57-59. 12. Feinberg, Harm to Others, p. 134; Marilyn Friedman, "The Practice of Partiality," Ethics 101(4)

(July 1991), p. 831. 13. Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 47;

see also Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 14. This argument against the existence of "positive" duties applies to any impartial, cosmopolitan

conception of duty in which individuals are thought to be the primary duty-bearers, including not only duties that correspond to human rights but also consequentialist duties.

Gosselin 51

15. See Jeremy Waldron, "Welfare and the Images of Charity" in J. Waldron, Liberal Rights: Col- lected Papers 1981-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 225-249.

16. A number of such arguments have been given, but I shall not explain or evaluate them here. See Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice; Alan Gewirth, The Community of Rights (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Alan Gewirth, "Starvation and Human Rights," in K.E. Goodpaster and K.M. Sayre (eds.), Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), pp. 139-158; James W. Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights: Philosophical Reflections on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987); Shue, Basic Rights; Henry Shue, "Solidarity among Strangers and the Right to Food," in W. Aiken and H. LaFollette (eds.), World Hunger and Morality: Second Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), pp. 113-132.

17. Note that philosophers disagree about what constitutes a claim, in other words what is the object that one seeks to secure in making a human rights claim. Common candidates for claims include need, interest, and agency requirements. For need- based accounts, see Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 166; and Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights. One interest approach is given by Joel Feinberg in Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). For accounts of claims as agency requirements, see Gewirth, Human Rights; H.L.A. Hart, "Are There Any Absolute Rights?" in J. Waldron (ed.), Theories of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 77-99; J.L. Mackie, "Can There Be a Right-Based Moral Theory?" in J. Waldron (ed.), Theories of Rights (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1984), pp. 168-181.

18. Peter A. French, "Types of Collectivities," in P. French (ed.), Individual and Collective Respon- sibility, Second Edition (Rochester VT: Schenkman Books, 1998), pp. 33-50.

19. Onora O'Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Onora O'Neill, Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice, and Development (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986).

20. O'Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, p. 129. 21. O'Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, p. 135. 22. O'Neill distinguishes between four general kinds of duties. Universal perfect obligations are held

by all and owed to all; they are the opposites of liberty or "negative" rights. Universal imperfect obligations are held by all and owed to none; they are obligations to oneself to improve one's character and express one's desired virtues as best as possible through action. Special perfect obligations are held by some and owed to specific others; these are opposites of special rights and are determined by specific transactions and relationships. They can also be distributed universally by appropriate institutions such as governments. Special imperfect obligations are held by some and owed to none; they are involved and expressed in specific relationships, practices, and characters (as in the virtue ethics model of partiality). Perfect obligations map onto impartial "negative" and "positive" rights, while imperfect obligations map onto virtue ethics' partial duties to oneself and others. Special perfect obligations are the duties of assistance that human rights theorists advocate as a response to poverty. O'Nell, Towards Justice and Virtue, pp.147-152.

23. E.g., Gewirth, Human Rights; Gewirth, "Starvation and Human Rights." 24. E.g.• Peg ••C•nn•r• •ppressi•n and Resp•nsibility: A Wittgensteinian Appr•a•h t• S••ial Pra•-

tices and Moral Theory (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 25. What counts as rightfully earning one's means is an issue I will not explore here. 26. Although I believe it can be argued that poverty is usually not merely a bad state of affairs, and

is actually a wrongful harm or institutional injustice as explained below, this argument is not necessary to show that the understanding of poverty as mere harm is inadequate to demonstrate to the libertarian why agents have responsibilities to address global poverty.

27. Duties of redress are justified according to the causal relationships an agent has to a harmful outcome, when an agent has made a morally relevant causal contribution to harm. Joel Feinberg describes this morally relevant causal connection as a contributory fault condition (CFC). The CFC establishes the liability of an agent that grounds duties to rectify the harm one has caused. Three conditions must be satisfied for a CFC to exist. First, it must be true that a person did the action in question, or at least that she made a substantial causal contribution to it. Second, the causally contributory action must somehow be faulty. Note that there is a distinction between action being faulty and an agent being at fault. Strict liability requires only that the action is faulty; the fault


of the agent is irrelevant. Third, there must be a necessary, relevant, and direct causal connection between the faulty action and its consequence (the harm that occurs as a result). If these three conditions can he satisfied, then the relevant causal connection between an agent's action and harm holds, justifying the liability of the agent. See Joel Feinberg, "Collective Responsibility," in L. May and S. Hoffman (eds.), Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical andApplied Ethics (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991), p. 53.

28. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Policy and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), pp.64-65.

29. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 92. 30. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,

1971), p. 126. 31. See J.L Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 80-82;

Rawls, 1971, p. 55. 32. Thomas W. Pogge, 'Human Flourishing and Universal Justice', SocialPhilosophy and Policy 16:1

(Winter 1999), pp. 337; Thomas W. Pogge, "Three Problems with Contractarian-Consequentialist Ways of Assessing Social Institutions," Social Philosophy and Policy (Summer 1995), p. 241.

33. Andrew Hurrell describes institutions in the following way: "International institutions are made up of two elements: first, clusters of connected norms, principles, and rules (constitutive, trans- actional, and societal); and, second, clusters of norms organized into stable and ongoing social practices." Andrew Hurrell, "Global Inequality and International Institutions," in T.W. Pogge (ed.), Global Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 36.

34. As discussed above, there are many different kinds of harms and injustices, and the institutional injustice that Young and Pogge identify is only one kind. Harm that is caused by faulty action, in which an agent's action makes a morally relevant causal contribution to resulting harm, is a case of wrongful harm, which demands corrective justice to "right the wrong," so to speak. Harm that results from social practices, on the other hand, in which no particular agent's action caused the harm in the morally relevant way, is a case of structural or institutional injustice, demanding a change in institutional practices so that individuals do not receive unjust burdens from their institutions based solely or primarily on their social positioning. If social harm results from faulty (whether intentional or not) action of particular agents, but it is a case of wrongful harm rather than institutional injustice.

35. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, pp. 64-65; see also Stefan Gosepath, "The Global Scope of Justice," in T.W. Pogge (ed.), Global Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 145-168; Hurrell, "Global Inequality and International Institutions" pp. 32-54; Onora O'Neill, "Agents of Justice" T.W. Pogge (ed.), Global Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 188-203.

36. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, p. 46. 37. Michael Green, "Institutional Responsibility for Global Problems," Philosophical Topics 30(2)

(Fall 2002), pp. 79-95. 38. Although arguing that collectives can have capacities for agency is beyond the scope of this paper,

any notion of collective responsibility assumes that collectives have some relevant agency capacities, such as those suggested above (e.g., decision-making and action-delegating procedures), since responsibility is predicated only of agents.

39. E.g. O'Neill, "Agents of Justice?' 40. For elaboration on some of these specific group memberships and roles, see Larry May, The

Morality of Groups: Collective Responsibility, Group-Based Harm, and Corporate Rights (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987); Larry May, Sharing Responsibility, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Larry May, The Socially Responsible Self: Social Theory and Professional Ethics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Young, Inclusion and Democracy.

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