1 This focus will allow me to bypass the already much-discussed questions of what nations are, exactly, and how they differ from modem states.

2 Priority for one's race and its members has fallen out of favour after having been taken to extremes in colonialism, slavery, and the Third Reich. But it is also beginning to gain new respectability: A great deal of prestige has lately come to be attached to commitments to one's ‘ethnicity,’ which is more complex than race by involving a certain commonality of culture over and above commonality of descent. And giving priority on the basis of shared purely biological features (such as race and gender) has also become acceptable, provided the group in question is an underprivileged minority within the relevant society. (There are subtle variations in emphasis: Some say that blacks should help blacks, others that blacks should help blacks.)

3 Raz, Joseph, Practical Reason and Norms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1990), ch. 1.2.Google Scholar

4 All these phenomena of compliance redefined are nicely illustrated, I believe, by modern soccer and basketball.

5 They may take this view with regret: “Too bad that this is what the sport has come to, but, seeing that others behave in this way, we can hardly afford to forego these options.” I will say more about this defence by appeal to a ‘sucker exemption’ at the end of this section.

6 Note that it is not the parents’ opposition to affirmative action that makes their reasoning offensive. Citizens may reasonably believe that a level playing field does not require, or even rules out, affirmative action. What is offensive is that their political stance is based not on what they conscientiously believe to be right and fair to all, but on what they think will benefit their own children (as brought out by their thought that they would strongly support affirmative action if their own children stood to gain therefrom). The example illustrates then a disposition to slant the social order by tailoring its basic rules. The mother of the previous example, by contrast, slanted the social order by corrupting the administration of its rules. In public life as in sports, a level playing field requires both: that the rules be fair and that they be impartially administered.

7 This general idea has truly become global, as abuse of political authority and power to benefit one's friends and family has begun to provoke great moral outrage and resentment in numerous developing countries of Asia, Latin America, and (to a lesser extent) Africa.

8 I assume here that it makes sense to judge how fully human rights can be realized in some institutional scheme by how fully they generally are (or, if the scheme is hypothetical, would be) actually realized in it. A full explication, in the spirit of Article 28, of the concept of human rights is presented in my ‘How Should Human Rights be Conceived?: in Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik 3 (1995) 103-120. By following the Universal Declaration's understanding of human rights as outer bounds on institutional schemes, one is not committed to its substantive conception (put forth in Articles 1-27) of what these outer bounds are.

9 Ambassador David A. Colson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans, in testimony before the Subcommittee on Oceanography of the Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives (April26, 1994)

10 Agreement Relating to the Implementation of Part XI of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 10 December 1982. Its Article 2(1) says: “In the event of an inconsistency between this agreement and Part XI, the provisions of this agreement shall prevail.“

11 U.S. Department of State, Commentary on the Law of the Sea Convention including the 1994 Amendments, 3. “The Agreement fully meets the objections of the United States and other industrialized states to Part XI” (ibid., 2), which were that: “it established a structure for administering the seabed mining regime that does not accord the industrialized States influence in the regime commensurate with their interests; it incorporated economic principles inconsistent with free market philosophy; and its specific provisions created numerous problems from an economic and commercial policy perspective that would have impeded access by the United States and other industrialized countries to the resources of the deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction” (ibid., 2-3).

12 “The provisions of Annex III, article 5, of the Convention shall not apply,” Section 5(2) of the Annex to the Agreement (cited in note 10).

13 Section 7(1) of the Annex to the Agreement (cited in note 10) limits the sharing of profits to “economic assistance” to “developing countries which suffer serious adverse effects on their export earnings or economies resulting from a reduction in the price of an affected mineral or in the volume of exports of that mineral, to the extent that such reduction is caused by [seabed mining].” Section 8(3) halves the application fee for exploration and exploitation of sites to US$250,000 and Section 8(2) eliminates the US$1,000,000 annual production fee as well as the profit-related financial contributions (all of which were mandated in the Convention's Annex III, Article 13).

14 Colson, testimony before Subcommittee on Oceanography (see note 9)

15 Germany and Great Britain were especially willing to go along with such a move. For Canada's position and strategy, see Riddell-Dixon, Elizabeth, Canada and the International Seabed (Kingston, ON: MeGill-Queen's University Press 1989)Google Scholar.

16 We can easily imagine Clinton saying, in analogy to our fictional parents, that he would of course have strongly favoured the sharing of technologies and economic benefits, if he had been the president of one of the poorer states. Few would have found such a remark morally offensive.

17 At current metals prices, seabed mining is not expected to become commercially viable for another twenty years or so.

18 For an explication and defence of the view that Article 28 requires our global institutional order, as well, to satisfy the outer bounds imposed by basic human rights, see my ‘Menschenrechte als moralische Ansprüche an globale Institutionen,’ in Gosepath, Stefan and Lohmann, Georg, eds., Die Philosophie der Menschenrechte (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1998)Google Scholar. That essay also seeks to illustrate how the global level of human-rights fulfilment is causally dependent on the structure of international institutions.

19 You may respond that any funds Part XI of the Convention might have raised for the least developed countries would have ended up in the pockets of corrupt Third-World politicians and bureaucrats. This is indeed where much ‘development aid’ ends up - because our politicians and bureaucrats need favours from them, not from the poor. But, surely, the choice of throwing money at corrupt Third-World elites versus ignoring global poverty does not exhaust the available options. Clinton might well have pressed for terms that ensure that the funds raised are spent on effective poverty eradication.

20 For a much more detailed elaboration of this argument, see my ‘Loopholes in Moralities,’ in Journal of Philosophy 89 (1992) 79-98. A similar argument is presented in Scheffler, Samuel, Families, Nations, and Strangers (The Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, 17 October 1994)Google Scholar as “the distributive objection to associative duties.“

21 Note that this initiative is, in one sense, more plausible than Clinton's: One can argue that, since public benefits are generated at the expense of those who pay income taxes, they alone should be eligible for them. Clinton cannot make a parallel argument, because ocean floor resources are not generated at anyone's expense. Of course, such resources will be harvested at the expense of mining firms. But this merely shows that the poor can claim a fair share (not of the extracted resources, but) only of the resources in situ. The value of these undeveloped resources could easily be determined through auctions in which competing firms would bid for the right to mine particular resources in particular regions of the ocean floor.

22 Why this distinction is thought to be morally significant is less mysterious. Those who have the opportunity to reflect upon morality publicly, in the media or in academic discourse, are, by and large, well-to-do persons in the more affluent countries. In these countries, the domestic poor have at least some capacity to articulate their claims and some power to make their voices heard. The parliamentary delegation I have imagined would provoke considerable protest and social unrest. The global poor, who labour all day for a few dollars a month, are unable to cause us the slightest inconvenience and unable even to alert us to their plight. Thanks to our military superiority, they fall outside what Rawls has called the circumstances of justice, following Hume: “Were there a species of creatures intermingled with men, which … were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never … make us feel the effects of their resentment; … the restraints of justice and property … would never have place in so unequal a confederacy.” Hume, David, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1972), 190fGoogle Scholar. Both Hume and Rawls stress rough equality of powers in the context of seeking to explain, not to justify, the exclusion of the very weak. See Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971), 127Google Scholar.

23 Some reforms designed to reduce the problems of undemocratic government, outsized national debts, and domestic poverty and inequality in the poorer countries are outlined in Pogge, ‘Menschenrechte.’ See also my ‘A Global Resources Dividend,’ in Crocker, David A. and Linden, Toby, eds., Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 1998), 502-37Google Scholar.

24 This huge discrepancy exists in the domain of general theory as well as in that of more concrete (or ‘applied’) work. Compare the amount of theorizing about domestic justice with that about international justice - or the moral scrutiny lavished on national affirmative-action legislation with that expended on the far more consequential ground rules structuring the world economy.

25 I concede that his conduct usually is morally worse if the victim is his mother. But this may be not because one ought to be more concerned to avoid harming family members than to avoid harming strangers, but because the harm is so much greater: The son is not merely inflicting physical pain without provocation; he is also showing ingratitude toward the person who raised him, deeply hurting her love and trust, and so on. Sam Scheffler holds, by contrast, that, according to ordinary morality, negative duties to strangers are more easily overridden by positive duties or by considerations of cost to the agent than negative duties to associates and family members are. See Scheffler, , Families, Nations, and Strangers, 5–6Google Scholar.

26 Goodin, Robert E., ‘What Is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?,’ in Ethics 98 (1988) 663-86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The list is at 668-9, the quote is from 673.

27 My formulation of the two provisos is intentionally vague as there is of course no agreement on how they should be specified exactly. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a weakening of negative duties through a special relationship such as compatriotism would be found acceptable in modern Western moral thinking only if it satisfied two substantial provisos of the general form I have sketched.

28 I hope I have made clear enough that this is not presented as a strict, or lexical, hierarchy. It is generally acknowledged that a higher moral reason can be outweighed by a lower, if more is at stake in the latter. Public reaction to the continuing massacres of the twentieth century shows, however, that the ‘exchange rates’ are extreme: Sexual harassment in a domestic auto plant engenders a much more powerful response than a genocidal massacre in Africa. Obviously, this hierarchy does not cover the entire domain of moral reason. It leaves out moral reasons to protect persons from harms that do not involve wrongdoing (e.g., natural harms) as well as moral reasons to benefit others. I would think that these are on a par with moral reasons to protect others from third-party wrongs ((2a)-(2z)), but am content to leave this question open here.

29 Many consider it perfectly all right for donors to favour even relatively trivial or well-supplied domestic causes- one's alma mater, the local park or museum, one's congregation- over relatively cheap life-saving efforts in the Third World: It is good to ‘give back’ to one's community, and fine to favour the causes one personally cares about.

30 Some 3 million children annually die of simple diarrhoea because their parents cannot obtain a 15-cent oral rehydration pack. Lack of vitamins and antibiotics lead to another 3.5 million deaths from pneumonia, one million deaths from measles, and so on. See Grant, James P., The State of the World's Children 1993 (New York: Oxford University Press 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 1996 (New York: Oxford University Press 1996), 20.

32 United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 1996, 222.

33 United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 1996, 27. Since the purchasing power of money (converted at market exchange rates) is about five times greater in the poorest countries (from ibid. 171, 179, 185), this poverty line corresponds to an annual per capita income of roughly US$75 at market exchange rates. If 24 percent of the world's population have less than US$75 annually, we may assume that those in the poorest quintile (20 percent) have on average about US$50 annually. (Mr. Selim Jahan, Deputy Director of the UNDP Human Development Report Office [New York City] has confirmed orally that the $1-per-day figure represents purchasing power, not income. This squares with figures in Dasgupta, Partha, An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution [Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993], 79f.)Google Scholar

34 They have argued that we should focus our beneficence on the global poor because the moral significance of a harm's position in the (1)-(2z) hierarchy is less than ordinary moral thinking supposes and/ or because the position of the global poor at the bottom of the list is overcome by the much lower cost/benefit ratio involved in helping them: For the price of enabling one poor local youngster to attend summer camp, we can save many foreign children's lives by giving the money to UNICEF for oral rehydration therapy. Representative examples of such lines of argument are Singer, Peter, ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality,’ in Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972) 229-43Google Scholar; Rachels, James, ‘Killing and Starving to Death,’ in Philosophy 54 (1979) 159-71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kagan, Shelly, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989)Google Scholar; and Unger, Peter, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Two notable exceptions are Nell, Onora [O'Neill], ‘Lifeboat Earth,’ in Philosophy and Public Affairs 4 (1975) 273-92Google Scholar, and Nagel, Thomas, ‘Poverty and Food: Why Charity Is Not Enough,’ in Brown, Peter and Shue, Henry, eds., Food Policy: The Responsibility of the United States in the Life and Death Choices (New York: The Free Press 1977), 54–62Google Scholar. Both emphasize our active involvement in the production of poverty.

35 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, 114Google Scholar.

36 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, 109Google Scholar. Natural duties to mutual aid and to mutual respect are there called positive, and natural duties not to injure and not to harm the innocent are called negative. Rawls does not make clear how he understands the negative/positive distinction. This does not matter, because I am concerned only with what he implies: that our natural duty of justice has the lesser weight of a positive duty.

37 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, 115Google Scholar; a parallel passage is on 334. See also 246: “as far as circumstances permit, we have a natural duty to remove any injustices, beginning with the most grievous as identified by the extent of the deviation from perfect justice.“

38 This loss may come from there being slightly less money available for administering our institutional order and from there being a slightly greater risk of damage to mutual trust from discovered non-compliance. I am assuming, quite in the spirit of Rawls, that the duty of justice is an interpersonal responsibility, a duty owed solely to other persons.

39 Rawls has extensively discussed the problem of stability and tried to solve it by envisioning the citizens of his well-ordered society as having a sense of justice that is effective and normally overriding. See, for example, Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press 1993), 141fGoogle Scholar. The puzzle is how citizens’ strong moral desire to comply can derive from their allegiance to a moral conception that recognizes only a weak moral reason to do so.

40 In both cases, it is widely acknowledged that a positive duty can still win out when very much more is at stake. One may usually break a promise, violate a just property regime, or injure an innocent when doing so is necessary to save a human life, for example.

41 Kant bases such institutions on the enforceable imperative: “Act outwardly so that the free employment of your will [Willkür] can coexist with the freedom of everyone according to a universal law.” Kant, Immanuel, Metaphysik der Sitten, vol. VI (Berlin: Prussian Academy 1914), 231 (my translation)Google Scholar.

42 This proposal does not justify a negative duty to comply with all existing just institutions. Success at exceeding the speed limit, or at breaching many social conventions and rules of etiquette, usually does not depend on others being constrained to comply. One may think that this line of argument also fails when a non-complying agent can claim to be in compliance with non-existing just institutions. He takes more freedom or resources than he is permitted to take under the existing just order, but does so in accordance with an equally just, albeit non-existing, regime whose rules everyone could be free to follow. Seeing that others could realize a just order by complying with the scheme he favours, why should he have a negative duty to comply with ours? I cannot answer this objection fully here. But the response must begin with the realization that it is generally not possible for each to take what she would be entitled to under the just order of her choice, irrespective of what order others are observing- whereas it is possible for each to take what she is entitled to under the one existing just order.

43 The Kantian strategy avoids the claim, suggested by Rawls, that a duty to comply with institutions can be derived from the mere fact that the institutions are just and (purport to) apply to us. This claim is convincingly criticized in Simmons, A. John, Moral Principles and Political Obligation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1979), 147-56Google Scholar. My sketch of how to justify a negative natural duty of justice fits with, and can be enriched by, the response to Simmons given in Waldron, Jeremy, ‘Special lies and Natural Duties,’ in Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993) 1–30Google Scholar.

44 I use ‘legitimacy’ here in the sociological sense specified by Max Weber. It is of the essence of justice that a majority's consent cannot lend moral legitimacy to the mistreatment of a minority. The Nazi case exemplifies harms inflicted by state officials, but essentially the same conclusion holds when the state merely legally sanctions undue harms and protects and aids those who inflict them, as when slavery was legally authorized in the U.S. and slaveholder rights were enforced by state officials, who helped put down revolts and capture fugitive slaves.

45 This conclusion squares well with common convictions, for example, that one has a stronger reason to oppose rules that exclude blacks or women from a club when one is oneself a member of it, even if the very same persons are excluded from other clubs whose rules one could oppose just as effectively.

46 The difference principle requires that “social and economic inequalities … are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society” (Rawls, John, Political Liberalism, 6Google Scholar). A global difference principle is rejected by Rawls himself, though others have argued that his theory commits him to accepting it. See Scanlon, T.M., ‘Rawls’ Theory of Justice,’ in Daniels, Norman, ed., Reading Rawls (New York: Basic Books 1974), 202Google Scholar; Barry, Brian, The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1972), 128-33Google Scholar; Beitz, Charles, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1979), 149-76Google Scholar; and my Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1989), ch. 6.

47 The assumption seems particularly dubious when the injustice in question appears to have the character of an omission. One may agree that a legal order in which inter-spousal violence is not prohibited nor effectively deterred is unjust and nevertheless deny that those who impose such a legal order are harming women unduly (rather than merely failing to protect them from their husbands’ wrongdoing).

48 Compare: How can one be unduly harming an unconscious accident victim if one does less than would have been possible by way of improving her situation?

49 In violation of Article 25 of the Universal Declaration: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care …. “

50 Locke, John, ‘An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government’ (1689), in Laslett, Peter, ed., John Locke: Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1960), §27 and §33Google Scholar. Subsequent parenthetical references are to this text. Locke imposes two further constraints on unilateral appropriations, which need not interest us here. One may take possession of any natural resource only by “mixing one's labour” with it (§27) and only insofar as nothing will spoil in one's possession (§31). We can also leave aside the question of how the freedom of unilateral appropriation, and the constraints upon this freedom, can be derived from Locke's fundamental ‘Law of Nature’ (§6).

51 The Lockean provisos are not subject to majority rule - undue harms inflicted on a few cannot be justified by the fact that the many want to inflict them (d. note 44 above). It is rather the other way around: Majority rule is itself an institution whose moral legitimacy depends on everyone's rational consent. Locke argues that majority rule satisfies this condition, while autocracy does not (§93, §137; cf. §20, §§90-6).

52 Could one not rationally agree to the creation of institutions that make persons better off on average? Locke has good reason not to argue in this way. Institutions cannot be justified to their present participants by appeal to the actual or hypothetical consent of their ancestors (§73, §121). And if we tell slaves or English day-labourers or the present global poor that they could have rationally agreed ex ante (in ignorance of their social position at birth) to institutions under which some may be worse off than persons in a state of nature, they can surely plausibly reply that this hypothetical consent could not possibly have been theirs, since they never had a real chance to occupy the better positions. (But see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 167, making the surprising and unnecessary claim that “the general form of the slaveholder's argument is correct“)

53 Rawls, if he held his theory of justice to be applicable to Brazil's social order at all, would be an exception, assigning to the Brazilian elite a merely positive duty to further (more) just arrangements. I have chosen Brazil, because it displays the greatest recorded income inequality of any country: the ratio between the top and bottom quintiles exceeds 32:1, and 45 percent of its population Jive below the international poverty line, despite a generous resource endowment and a per capita GNP of US$2,930. (All data in this note are from UNDP, Human Development Report 1996, pp. 170f, 176, 186f, 198.) It is sometimes said that extreme inequalities are the price for rapid economic growth which, over time, benefits all. But the available data tell a different story: The high-inequality countries (mainly in Latin America and Africa) have consistently shown very slow or even negative growth in per capita GNP, while the developing countries with rapid economic growth (mainly in East Asia) have quintile inequality ratios below 10:1, similar to those in many developed countries. This should not be surprising. When inequalities are very large, those born among the poor often suffer nutritional, medical, or educational deficits or disadvantages that prevent them from effectively competing for the more important positions. More or less by default, these positions then go to persons born among the wealthy and thus attract less talent and effort than they would with a more open competition. Because it tends to reduce productivity and innovation, as well as political stability, radical inequality depresses even the absolute share of the rich over time. Because they care about their relative share or because they care more about smaller near-term advantages than about larger long-term gains, the rich nevertheless often resist reform - as we do on the global plane.

54 “The poorest 20% of the world's people saw their share of global income decline from 2.3% to 1.4% in the past 30 years. Meanwhile, the share of the richest 20% rose from 70% to 85%. That doubled the ratio of the shares of the richest and the poorest- from 30:1 to 61:1.” UNDP, Human Development Report, 2. Note that the 61:1 ratio provided by the UNDP was calculated from country aggregates. The two relevant quintiles were formed by simply taking the populations of the richest and poorest countries, with each set of countries selected so that it represents one-fifth of world population (according to a written explanation received from Mr. Selim Jahan, Deputy Director of the UNDP Human Development Report Office). But this yields the ratio between the average income in the richest countries and the average income in the poorest countries, not the income ratio between the richest and poorest quintiles of “the world's people.” The former ratio is obviously a very bad estimate of the latter: the income of the richest quintile is underestimated, as many poor in the richest countries are much poorer than many rich in non-rich countries (so the latter, not the former, should be included in the top quintile). And the income of the poorest quintile is hugely inflated as the poorest in middle-income countries such as Brazil are excluded in favour of more affluent persons in the poorest countries (among them, for instance, President Mobutu Sese Seko, whose income was a rather considerable part of the Zairean national income). My best guess, based on all the 1993 data in the UNDP report, is that the richest quintile of world population has well over 90 percent of world income (ca. US$20,000 annually per capita) and the poorest quintile under 1/4 percent (ca. US$50 annually per capita; cf. note 33 above). This would suggest a quintile income inequality ratio around 400:1. Wealth inequality is, of course, considerably greater still, as the rich tend to have much more wealth than annual income and the poor tend to have much less wealth than annual income (with the poorest 20 percent having barely any wealth at all). These estimates may be disheartening by showing that the global poor are so much worse off than we thought, and our global economic order thus so much more unjust. But they should be heartening as well, by showing how much less of a reform than we thought would be necessary to double (even quadruple!) the income of the global poor. Ironically, those who like to claim that eradicating world poverty would impoverish the developed countries do not know how incredibly poor the global poor really are. Thus Rorty, for example, doubts that we are able to ‘help’ the global poor by appealing to the claim that “a politically feasible project of egalitarian redistribution of wealth requires there to be enough money around to insure that, after the redistribution, the rich will still be able to recognise themselves- will still think their lives worth living.” Rorty, Richard, ‘Who are We? Moral Universalism and Economic Triage,’ in Diogenes 173 (1996) 14fGoogle Scholar. Good that Rorty's readers are taught to take his essays as narratives!

55 Rawls, John, ‘The Law of Peoples,’ in Shute, Stephen and Hurley, Susan, eds., On Human Rights (New York: Basic Books 1993), 56Google Scholar

56 Rawls, , ‘The Law of Peoples,’ 77Google Scholar

57 For some background, see ‘Going on down,’ in The Economist, 8 June 1996, 46-48. The article reports that Nigeria is considered the world's most corrupt country and that its per capita income has been stagnant during the last 23 years of army rule, even while it receives oil revenues of about US$20 million per day (22 percent of its current GNP), which could have financed large productive investments in infrastructure and education.

58 See, for example, Amnesty International, Human Rights and U.S. Security Assistance (Boston: AIUSA Publications 1996).

59 My essay cited in note 18 develops this proposal in detail.

60 Canada eliminated the tax deductibility of bribes with its 1991 amendments to the Income Tax Act. The U.S. took a hard line with its 1977 Foreign Practices Act, after the Lockheed Corporation had paid a large bribe (ca. US$2,000,000) to the Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka. But in Europe, international bribery is only beginning to be addressed.

61 It is customary to object at this point that we have tried development aid and that it has failed. This is true enough (though not of the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands). But conventional development aid is allocated by politicians and has, not surprisingly, benefited those capable of reciprocation: export firms in the donor states and the political-economic elites of strategically important developing countries. Organizations that try to reach the poor and oppressed generally do so very well - though they do, of course, make mistakes occasionally. My essay cited in note 23 offers a detailed proposal for a global institutional reform that would be far more effective in eradicating global poverty than conventional bilateral aid.

62 How much should we contribute to such reform and protection efforts? I would think: as much as would be necessary to eradicate the harms, if others similarly placed made analogous contributions. One percent of the income of those in the top quintile of world population (d. note 54) would suffice to eradicate global poverty within a few years. Of course, one might make an equivalent non-monetary contribution instead.

63 See Bok, Hilary, ‘Acting Without Choosing,’ in NOÛS 30 (1996) 174-96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64 Stunning? Seeing that Immanuel Kant, a true giant, did not think to question women's lack of rights in politics and family life, perhaps nothing should surprise us.

65 One of them is the Canadian Craig Kielburger, who, starting at age 12, has been organizing a campaign against bonded child labour in the Third World.