effective enslavement. The annual death toll from poverty-related causes is
around 18 million, or one-third of all human deaths, which adds up to
approximately 270 million deaths since the end of the Cold War.^96Arguably, Pogge goes to far greater lengths in his work than most to take injustice
seriously, in the sense that he always takes pains to demonstrate that such
appalling states of affairs represent the perpetuation of ongoing, active injustices,
rather than unredressable misfortunes. He then sets out his grand project of
institutional reform.^97
But his project is still characterised by the view that injustice is best
conceived of as opposed to a “best” vision of justice to work towards. Again, he is
more careful than most to suggest workable proposals to move towards that ideal,
and grounds his account on empirical data. But arguably this approach falls prey to
the critiques of both Sen and Shklar.
In the first place, by designating a “best” and the route towards it, his
account depends entirely on an empirical story that may not prove to be robust.
Indeed, it is arguably undermined by the work of development economists like Paul
Collier who characterise the causes of extreme poverty in a more complex and
plural way than Pogge’s grand narrative allows.^98 Pogge’s transcendental
institutionalism does not really allow him the space to gather Sen’s “strong sense of
injustice on many different grounds”, and build from that through a comparative
process of public reasoning. Pogge does give us several grounds for injustice, but
they all point in the same direction, towards a possible resolution through the
development of cosmopolitan duties of justice, and continued inhumanity in their
absence.
In fact, as Thomas Nagel points out in response to Pogge’s case in World
Poverty and Human Rights : “[the] facts are so grim that justice may be a side issue.
Whatever view one takes of the applicability or inapplicability of standards of justice
96
Thomas Pogge, "World Poverty and Human Rights", Ethics & International Affairs 19, no.
1 (2005). A similar list can be found in the book that prompted the symposium Pogge,
World Poverty and Human Rights , 2. See also Onora O'Neill, Faces of Hunger: An Essay on
Poverty, Justice and Development 97 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 1.
98 See in particular Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights.
Collier, The Bottom Billion.