Daniel Weinstock

Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political Philosophy

Department of Philosophy

University of Montreal

Debates about distributive justice in the international sphere have been modeled on similar debates about justice within the state in many respects. I will focus on this paper on what I shall call the “redistributive fallacy”. This fallacy maintains that what distributive justice requires above all else is resource transfer, that is, the taking of resources from the better off and their transfer to the less fortunate.

This conception of distributive justice has led to a plethora of criticisms at the level of the domestic sphere, most notably those leveled at the basis of redistributive obligations from a Lockean perspective by Robert Nozick, and from a Hobbesian point of view by David Gauthier. But additional problems have been raised at the international level for conceptions of distributive justice premised upon the “redistributive fallacy”. These problems have to do, first, with the problem of enforcement. Even on the assumption that there is a moral right to some basic minimum, enforcement mechanisms are not reliably in place on the international level that might translate it into anything more than what Joel Feinberg has long ago called “manifesto rights”. Other problems have to do with the problem of assigning causal responsibility for severe poverty as a precondition for the attribution of moral obligations, and with the “proliferation of rights” that is risked if this condition is not respected.

Recent attempts to overcome these difficulties while remaining within the “redistributivist” paradigm do not succeed in overcoming these difficulties. I will attempt to show this in connection with Thomas Pogge’s recent work on “Severe Poverty as a Human Rights Violation”.

The suggestion that will be explored through this paper draws on arguments surrounding the creation of the modern welfare state, and shows that the welfare state was thought of only minimally as an institution dedicated to the transfer of resources between rich and poor, but much more about the creation of common institutions, that serve the interests of both rich and poor. I will try to show that the adaptation of this way of arguing for the welfare state both solves incentive problems that beset the redistributivist paradigm, and allows us to circumvent difficult theoretical issues to do with the attribution of causal responsibility for severe poverty. I will devote special attention to the problems dfaced by the setting up of global issues in public health.