ABSTRACT
Usual discussions of global justice strive to apply liberal or cosmopolitan notions
that invoke our common humanity to provoke those in higher income countries to
contribute to people in lower income countries. There is an admirable body of
literature that attempts to appeal to people’s better selves and to share their
wealth with those less fortunate around the globe. For example, in One World,
Peter Singer proposes that
GENDER JUSTICE AND DEVELOPMENT: LOCAL AND GLOBAL
Thomas Pogge (2008) has argued that from a justice perspective, wealthy
countries should be forced to accept responsibility for the injustices of global poverty that they helped to create and continue to perpetuate in their global
economic and political activities. For Pogge, rich states’ greater control over the institutions of the global political economy stand as an indictment in their
ongoing and continuing creation of global poverty. Feminist thinkers such as Carol Gould (2004) and Alison Jaggar (2005) have also argued that current arrange-
ments that insulate people in the Global North from the harm that their actions inflict upon others are unjust. Yet despite the force of these arguments, somehow they have failed to move citizens, publics, politicians, and states to
do enough. Most writers who advance partialist accounts of responsibility do so with the
hope of limiting broad claims for global responsibility. My claim here is quite different. This paper eschews the claim that we owe support to others simply
because, like us, they are human and their suffering, or their experience of depending upon care, should therefore matter. Thinking from such a perspec-
tive, the arguments are both too demanding and insufficiently demanding. They are too demanding because, if we take them seriously, they raise a problem of
limits: what is the proper response to others’ suffering? If people are really suffering, then why should Singer’s modest 1 percent contribution suffice? Perhaps those in higher income countries should abandon entirely their
profligate lifestyle. Caught by not knowing what is ‘enough’, too many people solve the moral issues by resorting to doing nothing. Instead, I shall argue that
stronger, and more action-inducing, partialist claims can be made if we think in terms of relational responsibilities towards others around the globe. In order to
make this claim, I need first to explain the nature of relational responsibility, and then to suggest how it can produce such strong claims. On the basis of the nature
of relational responsibilities themselves, I argue that the moral harm from abandoned relationships is the serious ground upon which deep and profound obligations to others around the globe are now owed. In the end, responsibility
understood relationally provides a stronger basis for and gives more content and meaning to claims about what various people around the globe owe to each
other.
