Thomas Pogge
In the absence of global democratic institutions or other mechanisms through which ordinary people can influence the formulation and application of supranational rules, we can expect regulatory capture with a spiral of increasing polarization that benefits a small minority at the tops – and, unintendedly but no less inexorably, keep down the bottom half of humankind.…
…Paradoxical as it sounds, a moralization of supranational rule making may be in the interest of the most powerful corporations precisely because they now have such unusually large power to shape such rules.
Biography
Thomas Pogge is currently Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. He is also Professorial Fellow at the ANU Centre for Applied Philosophy and Research Director at the Centre for Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is a prolific writer and lecturer, who has written extensively on moral and political philosophy, including books on cosmopolitanism, global justice and extreme poverty. His book World Poverty and Human Rights is regarded as one of the leading works on global justice. Pogge also heads a team that is working towards developing a complement to the pharmaceutical patent regime that would improve access to advanced medicines for the poor worldwide. His work on global justice and eradication of world poverty is marked by an emphasis on negative duties. He has argued that the massive persistence of severe poverty reflects not merely a breach by the global rich of their positive duty to assist people in great need but also a violation of their negative duty not to contribute to the imposition of a global institutional order that foreseeably and avoidably renders the basic socioeconomic human rights of millions unfulfilled.
Abstract
A Future to Avert: Law as Contributor to Instability and Polarisation
The next decades are very likely to bring a continuation of globalisation, involving a shift of law and regulation from the national to the global level. Supranational law and regulation will increasingly pre-empt, constrain, and shape national legislation. Barring a concerted effort to achieve deep structural reform, this aspect of globalisation will drive two undesirable trends. First, the increasing prominence of supranational rule making, which is undemocratic and mostly intransparent, continually enhances the rule-shaping powers of the most affluent individuals and organisations (relative to the vast majority of ordinary citizens). This is so because only these elite players have the resources and incentives, and can acquire the requisite expertise, successfully to lobby those stronger governments that dominate supranational rule-making. Bending supranational and national law to their will, a tiny global elite will continue to grow its share of global income, twisting law away from justice in the process and also gaining even more influence. This polarisation spiral will corrupt law and its application and will ensure, despite global economic growth, the massive persistence of poverty and disease. Second, regulatory capture will happen piecemeal. Any powerful player or coalition of such players will make concessions in areas where it has relatively less at stake in exchange for other such players making reciprocal concessions in other areas where it has relatively more at stake. Such trades are collectively rational insofar as they get all powerful players more of what they want. However, such trades are also dangerous. An elite coalition ‘buying’ control of some piece of supranational regulation will tend to disregard the needs of the rest of humankind and of future generations because it lacks assurances that other elite players practice analogous self-restraint. Moreover, insofar as various pieces of supranational regulation are shaped by different sets of players with diverse special interests, the whole international rule system will become incoherent and therefore vulnerable to crises that will continue to become increasingly severe.
