ABSTRACT

An apparently exasperated Thomas Pogge opens his influential book World Poverty and Human Rights with this question: 'How can severe poverty of half of humankind continue despite enormous economic and technological progress and despite the enlightened moral norms and values of our heavily dominant Western civilization?' (Pogge, 2002, p. 3). One clue to an answer, of course, lies in the 'despites'. Pogge implies that enormous economic and technological progress and enlightened Western moral norms and values provide the foundations for a just social and moral order, but any self-respecting Marxist, structuralist or political ecologist will hastily object that it is precisely that concept of progress and this set of moral norms and values that cause all the trouble in the first place. Indeed, Pogge himself hints at this kind of analysis when he implicates the global economic institutions designed in the West in the production of global poverty.