THOMAS POGGE'S NOTION OF GLOBAL JUSTICE REASSESSED

Abstract

Thomas Pogge in his work World Poverty and Human Rights created theories driven by human rights to center on negative rights and duties of the avoidance of harm. Pogge's theory of global justice is developed on a minimalist account of what it means to harm. He shares the view that violation of the negative duty not to harm constitutes an injustice. This injustice is done against the citizens of worse-off countries by the global institutional order. Citizens of well-off countries are carrying out injustice by harming the worse-off of the society through the imposition of a global order that avoidably creates human rights deficits without appropriate compensation or reform to policies. It is on this note, Pogge proposed the disbursement of global wealth, to the worse-off countries and their citizens. Consequently, the goal of this paper is to critically examine Pogge's proposal of global wealth distribution to the worse-off of the world and suggest alternative solution to the challenge of extreme poverty in a country like Nigeria. This paper establishes that Pogge's proposal is not plausible if applied to the Nigerian state. This is because it runs contrary to the theory of productive justice which holds that resources to be distributed to the global poor should first be produced by everyone in order to ensure equity and fairness amongst all instead of violating the rights of entitlement of those who have produced the available resources. Also, the paper argues that the major cause of extreme poverty in the world is domestically created rather than international. The paper concludes that, in order to deal with high level of poverty in Nigeria and make the Nigerian state more productive there is need for the fusion of political transparency and accountability and economic diversification solutions to tackle the domestic causes of severe poverty in Nigeria. The expository and critical analytic methods of philosophical inquiry are adopted.