...of this article is to respond to this challenge by proposing a global poverty eradication principle. Drawing on John Rawls's accounts of human rights and assistance for the law of peoples, I argue that poverty eradication on a global scale must be established as a central priority of public policy at all levels, domestic and international. Which duty applies in a given case is based on the nature of the relationship between persons affected by poverty and their governments, with implications for the selection of appropriate means, but always with the same conclusion vis-a-vis the goal of global poverty eradication, regardless of causal patterns that may obtain.

In arguing for a global poverty eradication principle, I begin by taking the duties of human rights and assistance for granted in order to demonstrate their less noticed implications. A full account of global poverty eradication cannot leave it at that, however, and must show why the duties of human rights and assistance apply, even to societies that may reject them. To that end, I consider reasons for including these two duties in the law of peoples. This is important, since Rawls himself invokes the duties, but does not give grounds for them. After having clarified what I take to be the foundations of human rights and assistance, I point out some of the challenges that are likely to arise in the application of the global poverty eradication principle. While I cannot hope to settle these practical problems philosophically, flagging them helps to clarify the scope of application of the global poverty eradication principle and gives a sense of the concrete targets and measures that could be adopted in working toward its fulfillment in practice, especially for the elimination of certain types of severe deprivation at a minimum.

A GLOBAL POVERTY ERADICATION PRINCIPLE

In its encounter with the realities of widespread poverty, Rawls's The Law of Peoples can be interpreted in support of a global poverty eradication principle. In this work, Rawls redeploys his famous original position at the global level, this time to generate principles of justice to regulate relations between "peoples"--the Rawlsian term for political communities. The procedure starts as in the domestic case, with fairly situated parties choosing principles of justice behind a veil of ignorance in an appropriately modeled original position. Rawls argues that eight familiar principles implicit in the public political culture of a democratic society of peoples would be selected in the global original position and endorsed in a global reflective equilibrium (3) These principles specify the obligations that political communities have in their relations with each other and in their engagements with the world.

In developing the law of peoples, Rawls is greatly concerned with the "highly nonideal conditions of our world, with its great injustices and widespread social evils." (4) Extreme poverty is one of these great injustices, alongside the other evils that have plagued human history, such as unjust wars, oppression, genocide, and mass murder. Like these other evils, absolute poverty demands a response wherever it is experienced. (5) The law of peoples specifies the parameters of that response in a way that I argue culminates in a global poverty eradication principle. Interestingly, Rawls himself does not explicitly include such a principle in his own formulation of the principles of the law of peoples. I suggest that this omission rests on Rawls's implicit assumption that when taken seriously, two of the principles he does include in the law of peoples already attend to the problem of absolute poverty. These are the principles of honoring human rights and assisting burdened societies. Together, they establish the moral grounds of the obligation to eradicate absolute poverty on a global scale.

The first part of the argument for global poverty eradication involves human rights. As in Rawls's domestic theory of justice, the law of peoples does not offer a comprehensive theoretical account of rights, but rather proceeds by specifying them in a list. (6) First and foremost among basic human rights is the right to life, understood in terms of the right to the means of subsistence and security, including minimum economic security. (7) Subsistence rights are basic, "since the sensible and rational exercise of all liberties, of whatever kind, as well as the intelligent use of property, always implies having general all-purpose economic means." (8) Once it is identified as a basic human right in this way, the right to minimum economic security becomes a matter for international concern. All well-ordered peoples are expected to secure for their members the human rights specified by Rawls's list in the law of peoples, including basic subsistence rights. It follows that if the government of a country plays an active role in perpetuating poverty, that country is to be treated as an outlaw state.

Outlaw states cannot take part in the society of peoples as members in good standing, since they "refuse to comply with a reasonable law of peoples." (9) The primary, although not only, illustration of noncompliance for Rawls comes from an aggressive regime that resorts to war to pursue its interests. (10) Such states are not to be tolerated by the society of well-ordered peoples, and for very good reasons: "Outlaw states are aggressive and dangerous; all peoples are safer and more secure if such states change, or are forced to change, their ways." (11) Hence, outlaw states do not enjoy the various protections accorded by the law of peoples, such as the rights of freedom, independence, equality, and self-defense. They can be subjected to various types of international interference geared to change their ways, as the case demands. (12) Intervention may or may not entail the use of military force, with its precise form depending on the severity of the violations and the chances of success of alternative responses. Ultimately, the specific choice of courses of action in particular circumstances is "a matter of political judgment and depends upon a political assessment of the likely consequences of various policies. (13)

The systematic violation of basic human rights confers outlaw status in the law of peoples, even when the perpetrators are not aggressive and pose no threat to international peace and security. Rawls is very clear about this on the two occasions where he takes up "the question of interfering with outlaw states simply for their violation of human rights even when these states are not dangerous and aggressive, but indeed quite weak." (14) "Certainly there is a prima facie case for intervention of some kind in such cases," he concludes, since societies that do not honor basic human rights cannot properly be called "a system of cooperation and cannot be part of an international system of cooperation. (15) Where this is likely to work, well-ordered peoples must persuade the offenders to change their ways--for example, by making their participation in various international cooperative arrangements, such as trade, conditional upon the ceasing of their human-rights-violating practices and by imposing sanctions when they fail to do so. If, however, "the offenses against human rights are egregious and the society does not respond to the imposition of sanctions, [even military] intervention in the defense of human rights would be acceptable and would be called for." (16) What is unambiguous in this formulation is that severe violators of basic human rights remain outlaws despite their efforts to be pacific in their relations with other societies.

Simply put, governments who are systematically implicated in the perpetuation of...

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