Thomas Pogge

The Progressive Potential of Human Rights

We might begin reflection on the progressive potential of human rights by looking at the role that human rights are supposed to play within the present international order. Here two main functions stand out. First, human rights are meant to constrain and inform the conduct of political authorities: of governments and their various domestic and international agencies and organizations. Governments must respect the human right of those living under their authority and of others they may interact with. Governments must protect the human rights of members of their state against internal and external threats from crime, war, civil war and terrorism, from natural catastrophes including epidemics and human-made ecological disasters, and from threats to the economic preconditions for meeting the basic needs of the state’s members. Insofar as these efforts to respect and protect prove insufficient, governments must also provide for their citizens any missing objects of human rights, for example food aid in the event of a flood or a draught.¹²

Second, human rights are also supposed to motivate and guide the design of an international back-up regime of governments that step in with assistance, incentives and compulsion when one state’s political authorities are unable or unwilling to meet their human rights-based responsibilities to respect, protect or provide. Various existing international governmental organizations and arrangements can be seen as elements of such a regime: the UN Security Council with its Chapter-7 authority to use coercive measures, including military force, to deal with “any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” (UN Charter 1948, Art. 39, 41, 42); the World Health Organization (WHO) with its mechanisms for responding to the outbreak of epidemics; the World Food Program (WFP) delivering emergency food aid to famine-stricken regions; and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) charged with averting a major human-rights catastrophe caused by the warming of our planet as a result of excessive greenhouse gas emissions.¹³

With this being the prevailing understanding, the objects of human rights are amply protected in our world, protected by a sequence of “waves of duties.”¹⁴ Are human rights then also amply fulfilled in our world? As Amnesty International keeps reminding us, “torture is flourishing in at least three quarters of the world’s countries” (Amnesty International 2014, back cover). And the state of social and economic human rights can only be described as appalling. According to the latest official figures, of the 7.3 billion people alive today, 842 million are officially counted as undernourished (FAO, IFAD and WFP 2013, pp. 8, 42), well over 1 billion lack adequate shelter (Rolnik 2014, p. 1), 748 million lack safe drinking water (Too-Kong 2014, p. 47), 1.8 billion lack adequate sanitation (Too-Kong 2014, p. 45), over 1.2 billion lack electricity (World Bank 2013, http://go.worldbank.org/6ITD8WA1A0), more than one-third lack reliable access to essential medicines (Nyanwura and Esena 2013, p. 208), 781 million over age 14 are illiterate (UNESCO 2013, www.uis.unesco.org/literacy/Pages/literacy-data-release-2014.aspx), and 168 million children aged 5 to 17 do wage work outside their household – often under slavery-like and hazardous conditions: as soldiers, prostitutes or domestic servants, or in agriculture, construction, textile or carpet production (ILO 2014, www.ilo.org/global/topics/child-labour/lang--en/index.htm).

We must conclude, then, that human rights fulfill both of their functions rather poorly. Many governments are unwilling or unable to realize human rights within their territory. And international responses to the remaining massive human rights deficits are discordant, selective and unreliable: the powerful (the U.S., Russia, and China) are routinely exempt from sanctions and the marginal are routinely left unprotected (the people of Libya and Syria recently, or the victims of the genocide in Rwanda). What should we conclude from these facts about the plausibility of the prevailing understanding of human rights?

It depends on how we conceive of human rights. We might conceive of them as a central piece of political morality, and of morality as a purely passive system of timeless universal standards to be used to assess, from an imagined extra- or post-historical standpoint, the relevant occurrences in human history: the conduct and character of human agents, human rules and various pertinent states of affairs. On this conception, it is no fault of our evaluative standards that the world falls far short of them – that, in particular, governments fail to meet their primary and secondary responsibilities. Alternatively, we might conceive of human rights, and perhaps of morality more generally, as practical tools in the struggle to achieve a world in which all human beings live in the firm knowledge that they can securely enjoy certain basic freedoms and securely meet their basic needs. On this alternative conception, we might well conclude that this tool has worked poorly and that we should at least explore ways of adapting our morality to make it more effective at achieving what, by its own lights, matters.

Staying with this latter conception of human rights, why have the rhetoric and legal apparatus of human rights not been a more effective tool in their realization? How can we change this tool or its use so as to make it more effective? One prominent response to these questions involves rethinking the ambitiousness of our list of human rights. Thus, some scholars have argued that by unsystematically recognizing too many human rights, the UN has drawn attention away from the most urgent ones, generally diluting the importance people assign to human rights considerations.¹⁵ Arguably, then, even the expansive set of human rights currently recognized would be better realized if we were officially committed to only a substantially smaller subset of them.

Unconvinced that this diagnosis gets to the heart of the problem, I will here explore a different adaptation of the way the human rights tool is deployed. The basic idea is to apply this tool in a new place: to fight for a central role for human rights in the intergovernmental negotiations through which supranational institutional arrangements are designed.

The last thirty years have seen the rapid emergence of a dense network of global institutional arrangements that now profoundly influence international interactions and also reach deep into the inner lives of national societies. In shaping these institutional arrangements, the more powerful governments, especially those of the United States and its main allies, have played a dominant role. In exerting this influence, these governments were in turn heavily influenced by their most powerful constituents: large investors and the leaders of powerful multinational corporations, industry associations, banks and hedge funds. It is then unsurprising that this rapidly emerging global order reflects the interests of these highly privileged agents. They do not, to be sure, intend any harm to the poor. But they do try to increase their own share of global income, and, insofar as they succeed, the shares of poorer segments of the human population must decline. As the poor are least able to exert political influence – especially on supranational institutional design decisions – it is to be expected that their needs and interests are systematically disregarded. Global institutional arrangements generate a severe headwind against the global poor, a headwind that existing efforts by governments to fulfill their various waves of duties are woefully insufficient to neutralize. We see this when we observe that socio-economic inequality has been rising globally and in most countries, causing severe poverty to persist as the poor are unable to participate proportionally in global economic growth. In the 1988–2008 period, for instance, the income share of the poorest 30 percent of the world’s population has shrunk from an already minuscule 1.52% to an even tinier 1.25% of global household income.¹⁶

What I am asking for, then, is that we stop thinking of supranational rule making as a morality-free zone in which it is acceptable for partisan government representatives to strike bargains for mutual advantage. Instead, we should recognize and highlight the fact that everyday supranational rule making, notably in the economic sphere, has profound effects on human rights fulfillment around the world. And we should accept the principle that supranational institutional arrangements should be shaped so that human rights are fulfilled insofar as this is reasonably possible. Can such a change be effected? And if so, how?

The change can be supported by appeal to the venerable core document of the post-World War II human rights movement, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 28 reads: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.” This Article clearly calls for human rights to be applied to the design and reform of our international order. What difference would it make if the most powerful governments took this Article to heart and allowed their supranational rule making to be constrained by the imperative of human rights fulfillment?

Let me illustrate the difference this could make with two examples: the new international rules governing pharmaceutical innovation, which systematically deprive poor populations of access to advanced medicines, and the rules governing international accounting and taxation, which systematically deprive poor populations of investment capital and tax revenues.

First Illustration: Pharmaceutical Patents and the Health Impact Fund

The current system of pharmaceutical provision is shaped by Annex 1C of the WTO Agreement covering Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) (WTO 2014, www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_01_e.htm). Innovators are rewarded through national patents that give them exclusive rights on the manufacture and sale of their new medicines for at least 20 years.

Given the prevailing enormous economic inequalities, this system leads to exorbitant mark-ups that make patented medicines unaffordable to a majority of humankind. It also steers pharmaceutical research away from diseases concentrated among the poor and toward the development of maintenance drugs and close substitutes (“me-too drugs”). Additional inefficiencies arise from massive deadweight losses and wasteful expenditures on countless patents and patent litigation, competitive advertising and counterfeits.

The system could be greatly improved by adding a second reward track for pharmaceutical innovators. The Health Impact Fund (HIF, see www.healthim pactfund.org) is a proposed pay-for-performance scheme that would offer innovators the option to register any new medicine, thereby undertaking to make it available, during its first 10 years on the market, at or below cost. The registrant would further commit to allowing, at no charge, generic production and distribution of the product after expiration of this reward period.

In exchange, the registrant would participate during that decade in fixed annual reward pools divided among all registered products according to their measured health impact. The size of these pools could be chosen to incentivize an appropriate number of important research and development (R&D) projects. At its minimum size of $6 billion annually, the HIF might support some 25 new medicines at any time, with two or three entering and leaving each year.

Since the strength of the incentives depends on secure long-term funding, the reward pools would ideally be financed through a sizable endowment fed from contributions by states (proportional to their gross national income), international agencies, NGOs, foundations, corporations, individuals, and estates. Such contributions to the HIF would produce vastly greater health gains per dollar than the $600 billion that humanity is now spending each year on patented medicines. This is so because of the HIF’s much greater efficiency. The HIF would avoid the bias in favour of maintenance drugs by fully rewarding health gains achieved by preventative and curative drugs. It would discourage the development of me-too drugs by rewarding them only insofar as they produce health gains beyond those achieved by their similar predecessors. It would motivate registrants to care not about mere sales but about health gains: a registrant would focus its marketing on patients who can really benefit from its product and would try to ensure that its medicines are widely available, competently prescribed and optimally used. Additional dramatic advantages in efficiency would arise from avoiding deadweight losses (no mark-ups), counterfeiting (with the genuine item widely available at or below cost, making and selling fakes is unprofitable) and expensive litigation (generic firms would lack incentives to compete, and regis-trants would lack incentives to suppress generic products and might therefore not even bother to file for patents in most national jurisdictions). Through all these efficiency gains and lower drug prices, the HIF might well pay for itself, allowing contributors to realize offsetting savings in national health systems, insurance premiums, insurance payments, direct pharmacy purchases and foreign aid.

The most important reason for the HIF, however, is that it would end the exclusion of the world’s poor from advanced medicines and would thereby make a major contribution to the realization of human rights. The HIF would stimulate the development of new high-impact medicines especially against the now-neglected diseases of the poor, which it would turn into some of the most lucrative pharmaceutical R&D opportunities. And the HIF would promote access to all registered medicines by limiting their price to the lowest feasible cost of manufacture and distribution, by motivating registrants to sell to the very poor even below cost in order to earn additional health impact rewards and by encouraging efforts, even in the poorest populations, to ensure that medicines are optimally used.

Second Illustration: Curtailing Illicit Financial Outflows from the Less Developed Countries

On the prevailing understanding, the first-line responsibility for the large human-rights deficits remaining in the less developed countries lies with the governments of these countries. But the task is large and most of these governments are poor. While the industrialized states have annual revenues in the order of $20,000 to $50,000 per citizen, India has annual revenues of barely $200 per citizen and many other governments are poorer still. These large international discrepancies are due to two factors: the per capita gross domestic products of poor countries are much smaller; and these countries also raise a much smaller proportion of their GDPs as government revenues, typically under 20% as compared to an OECD average of well over 40%.

Through sophisticated efforts, wealthy citizens of poor countries, and corporations operating there, escape taxation to an extent that would be unthinkable in an affluent country with political clout and a highly sophisticated and wellfunded tax administration. Boston Consulting Group estimates that 33.3% of all private financial wealth owned by people in Africa and the Middle East and 25.6% of such wealth owned by Latin Americans – some $2.6 trillion in total – is kept abroad; while the analogous estimates for North America and Europe are 1.8% and 7.9%, respectively (Boston Consulting Group 2013, pp. 4, 11). To collect taxes on the income and capital gains generated by this wealth, poor countries must largely rely on the honesty of their taxpayers as they lack access to information about their citizens’ overseas holdings.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) also massively escape taxation typically by creating additional subsidiaries in tax havens and then letting their poor-country subsidiaries contract with their tax-haven subsidiaries into money-losing arrangements involving trade mis-invoicing, abusive transfer prices as well as inflated consulting and intellectual-property fees (Hearson and Brooks 2012). These arrangements diminish the taxed profits of the poor-country subsidiaries while increasing the untaxed profits of the tax-haven subsidiaries. Global Financial Integrity estimates that corporate tax abuse accounts for 80% of all illicit financial outflows from less developed countries, or about $4.7 trillion during the 2002–11 period and $760 billion in 2011 alone (Kar and LeBlanc 2013, pp. iii, vii, x). This amount is five or six times the sum total of all official development assistance flowing into these countries during the same periods (http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/SeriesDetail.aspx?srid=569&crid=). Christian Aid calculates that, through these profit- and tax-diminishing capital outflows, governments of less developed countries have lost tax revenues in the order of $160 billion annually – or about $2.5 trillion for the Millennium Development Goals period (2000–2015). “If that money was available to allocate according to current spending patterns, the amount going into health services could save the lives of 350,000 children under the age of five every year” (Christian Aid 2009, p. 3).¹⁷

Four groups of agents bear direct responsibility for the human rights deficit that results from poor countries’ inability fully to collect reasonable taxes. First, the secrecy jurisdictions and tax haven countries (including Switzerland, Singapore, Ireland, the UK and the US) that structure their tax and legal systems so as to encourage tax abuse and also typically protect bank secrecy against the tax authorities of less developed countries. Second, the individuals and corporations that erode the tax base of poor countries by using tax havens to dodge taxes on their wealth and profits. Third, the bankers, lawyers, accountants and lobbyists who devise, implement and “legalize” these schemes. Fourth, powerful rich-country governments that allow their own country to serve as a tax haven for foreign MNCs, facilitate the tax dodging of their MNCs abroad,¹⁸ or oblige tax havens to cooperate with their own tax enforcement efforts without ensuring that poor-country governments receive similar cooperation.¹⁹

The key to reducing the tax gap and consequent human rights deficits in the poor countries involves reform of the international tax system toward global financial transparency. The most promising and realistic elements of such a reform can be gleaned from a Delphi study involving iterated inputs from 29 illicit financial flows experts from various backgrounds, including academia, NGOs, the private sector and multilateral institutions (Payne, Rowe, Bolger and Shubert 2014). This study revealed overwhelming expert support for reforms that would increase financial transparency at both the domestic and global levels. In particular, there is consensus that all governments should agree to mandate (a) disclosure of the ultimate beneficial owners of companies and of the controlling parties of trusts and foundations, (b) public country-by-country reporting of profits and other tax-relevant information by multinational enterprises, (c) automatic exchange of tax-relevant financial information by national tax authorities worldwide, (d) public reporting on funds paid to governments for the extraction of natural resources and on the use of those funds and (e) tough sanctions, including jail time, for professionals who facilitate illicit financial flows, for instance senior officers of global banks, accounting firms, law firms, insurance companies and hedge funds. In addition, governments should jointly commit to (f) harmonizing anti-money laundering regulations internationally and (g) carrying out clear, reliable, frequent and timely public fiscal reporting as well as opening up their fiscal policy-making process to public participation. Such financial transparency would greatly reduce illicit financial flows that, by draining less developed countries of capital and tax revenues, constitute a great impediment to sustainable development. Such transparency would additionally protect human rights also by curtailing the activities of criminals such as terrorists, money-launderers, and traffickers in persons, drugs and weapons.²⁰

The two case studies illustrate how important existing supranational institutional arrangements can realistically be reformed so as to make them much less hostile to human rights fulfillment.²¹ They begin to show that a substantial part of the horrendous current human rights deficit is traceable to how governments have shaped this emerging global order during the globalization period. The illustrations also bring out that we, the governments and citizens of the more affluent countries, are not mere bystanders to the deprivations suffered by the world’s poor, but – through our foreign policies and especially our governments’ role in shaping international rules and practices – are active participants in the non-fulfillment of their human rights. With some 18 million people dying prematurely each year from poverty-related causes, this may well be the largest, though not the gravest, human rights violation in human history. We must end it as quickly and decisively as we can by structuring, in accordance with Article 28 of the Universal Declaration, the rules of international cooperation so as to realize human rights insofar as this is reasonably possible.

Integrating Human Rights into a Large Vision of Historical Progress

Many find the above human rights argument for global institutional reform compelling. But many also find that the argument leaves them cold, that the vision of a future world in which human rights are fully realized is not a sufficiently inspiring ideal that can truly capture our imagination. By design, human rights define a minimal threshold below which no human being should be reduced. A world in which human rights are fully realized can therefore still fall short in many ways, even in regard to political justice – for instance, it could be a world of very large and ever-increasing social, economic and political inequalities. To make the human rights argument practically and politically successful, we may then need to embed it in a richer vision of a future world that our efforts to realize human rights here and now can contribute to. I will try to do this here by describing a higher ideal that lies beyond the vision of a human-rights-compliant world order and, while still being realistic, can provide more inspiration for us to struggle for progress toward human rights and beyond.

What I have in mind is the extension to the global plane of an ideal that is familiar in domestic settings: the ideal of anti-nepotism. On reflection, this is actually quite a surprising element of ordinary moral thinking. Human beings can form very close bonds with one another: the bond between a parent and her child, for example. And it is very natural, then, for people who stand in such a very close relationship to give it much special weight: for a mother, say, greatly to prioritize her child over other people to whom she has a much slighter attachment or none at all. To be sure, the special weight a mother may give to the needs and interests of her child is not unlimited; but it is nevertheless quite substantial. It is all the more remarkable, then, that ordinary morality strictly limits the scope of any such partiality: there are certain contexts in which she may give even quite important interests of her child no special weight at all. When she makes decisions as principal of a high school, for instance, it would be wrong – unfair – of her to give greater weight to her own child’s interest in good grades than to the analogous interest of other pupils. The same is true when she holds a public office that involves the awarding of government contracts.

The same is true even when she merely exercises the office of citizen, when she weighs in, for instance, on the question whether and how affirmative action should be continued in her country. In this context it would again be unfair of her if she based her public statements on private reasoning such as the following: “I love my children and, if they were girls or black , I would of course speak up in support of affirmative action. But in fact my kids are both white boys who would be taxed to fund an affirmative action effort that would also erode their competitive advantage over girls and non-white kids. For the sake of my children, I will therefore use my political voice in opposition to affirmative action programs.” Even opponents of affirmative action would find such reasoning morally deficient: it is widely agreed that, in their public pronouncements and electoral decisions about matters of legislation and institutional design, citizens ought to set aside their private commitments and loyalties to focus exclusively on social justice and the national good .

This piece of ordinary moral thinking is surprisingly demanding. The requirement is not merely that, in cases of conflict or competition, one should give more weight to the demands of one’s public roles – as parliamentarian or citizen, as judge, principal or procurement officer – than to any reasons arising from one’s private roles. The requirement is rather that, in exercising one’s public roles in designing and applying the rules and procedures of one’s national society, one ought to be strictly impartial by giving no extra weight whatsoever to the needs and interests of one’s own children, spouse, parents and friends for example. Acting in such an official role, one is to treat its demands as providing what Joseph Raz has called exclusionary reasons, that is, strong first-order reasons combined with second-order reasons to set aside other first-order reasons that would otherwise have competing relevance to one’s conduct decisions (Raz 1990, ch. 1.2).²²

It is remarkable that, in many national societies, such an impartiality requirement associated with certain roles and performances has come to be internalized and honored to the extent that it is. Centuries of social struggle on different continents and in diverse cultures have preceded this civilizational achievement. Crucially important to the historical outcome is the plain fact that, in any historical period, societies that were ahead in terms of internalizing a strong national impartiality requirement had a substantial competitive advantage over societies that were behind. By interfering with an efficient, merit-based division of labor, nepotism is a serious drag on a society’s ability to solve its problems and to hold its own against other societies.

Let me try to sketch such a strong national impartiality requirement in a little more detail. Its guiding idea is that the basic rules of a society as well as its policies and officials ought to be fair by showing equal concern for the needs and interests of all members of this society. This implies various procedural and substantive requirements on national political organization. On the procedural side it implies that those who are bound by national rules enforced upon them within the national territory ought to be able to play an equal role in the formulation of these rules and of the institutional arrangements implementing and enforcing them. It would be clearly incompatible with citizens’ equal moral standing, for example, if some society’s laws were made by an assembly whose members were elected by male citizens alone or through a system of weighted voting that favors whites or males, for instance, or those who pay more taxes or live in thinly populated areas. Absent a compelling reason for giving more weight to the judgments of some citizens than to those of others,²³ some broadly democratic national system of government is required by the commitment to moral equality.

Somewhat more controversial is the idea that the moral equality of citizens places not merely formal but also material constraints on procedures of collective decision making. John Rawls argues, for instance, that the moral equality of citizens is violated by a society that does not maintain the fair value of the political liberties – a society like the United States, for instance, whose political competition is in large part funded and shaped by private campaign contributions.²⁴ Though formally satisfying the one-person-one vote requirement, the US in fact more closely approximates a one-dollar-one-vote system in which political outcomes are routinely auctioned and purchased through lobbying.

In addition to such (formal and material) procedural implications, the equal moral standing of citizens is widely believed also to entail substantive constraints on the legislative output of national political processes. These substantive constraints can again be classified as formal or material. A law barring an ethnic, religious or linguistic minority from higher education, for instance, would be widely condemned as a formal violation of the moral equality of the members of the excluded minority. The material constraint such equal moral standing imposes on legislative outputs might be generally stated as the demand that the design of a society’s social and economic institutions ought to reflect equitable tradeoffs among the needs and interests of different population segments. Theorists differ on how to specify this demand. A weak version, which would probably be widely accepted in contemporary political philosophy, might be this. In the choice between two candidate national legislative outcomes, N1 and N2, if the representative groups that would do better with a decision in favor of N1 are (i) larger, (ii) worse off²⁵ and also (iii) more strongly affected by the outcome than the representative groups that would do better with a decision in favor of N2, then the basic commitment to moral equality requires that N1 be chosen over N2.²⁶ A national legislature making the opposite choice cannot credibly claim to be recognizing the losers as the moral equals of the winners, to be attaching as much importance to the needs and interests of the former as it is attaching to the needs and interests of the latter.

As I have sketched it, this national impartiality requirement may well be more detailed and determinate than the widely shared moral view I was trying to characterize. The fact remains that, in many countries, the moral commitment to such a national impartiality requirement is widespread and highly effective – partly through corresponding criminal law but mainly through internalization and informal sanctions – in keeping nepotism at bay. National impartiality requirements ground a defeasible presumption in favor of equal treatment that, though easily defeated in many contexts, is quite powerful in the absence of defeating reasons.

The formation of a highly influential global institutional order makes it highly appropriate to promote the emergence of a widespread moral commitment to an analogous global impartiality requirement. Its basic rationale would be that the fundamental equality of all human beings demands that, insofar as human agents are involved in the design or administration of global rules, practices or organizations, they ought to disregard their private, local and national commitments and loyalties to give equal consideration to the needs and interests of every human being on this planet .²⁷ In these special contexts, agents ought to be guided exclusively by agent-neutral considerations.²⁸

We might begin to specify such a global impartiality requirement by sketching analogues to the four implications of national impartiality explored in the preceding section. First, the equal moral standing of all human beings implies that global decision making ought to be designed so that all human beings are enabled to play a role in the formulation of global rules and of the global institutional arrangements that are implementing and enforcing these rules (proce -dural-formal). Second, in analogy to Rawls’s fair-value requirement, moral equality implies, that global decision making ought to afford even to poorer, more vulnerable human beings opportunities to exert real political influence which do not fall far short of the corresponding opportunities enjoyed by wealthy and privileged people around the world (procedural-material).²⁹ Third, moral equality implies that all should be able to participate in global institutions, such as markets and communications, on equal terms (substantive-formal). Fourth, the moral equality of all human beings also implies that decisions about global rules must meet the analogue of the weak demand: in the choice between two candidate global agreements, G1 and G2, if the representative groups that would do better with a decision in favor of G1 are (i) larger, (ii) worse off and also (iii) more strongly affected by the outcome than the representative groups that would do better with a decision in favor of G2, then the basic commitment to moral equality requires that G1 be chosen over G2 (substantive-material). An international summit or rule-making body reaching the opposite decision cannot credibly claim to be recognizing the losers as the moral equals of the winners, to be attaching as much importance to the needs and interests of the former as it is attaching to the needs and interests of the latter.

Needless to say, present global political decision-making does not remotely satisfy any of these demands; and the supranational analogue of nepotism is so widely taken for granted that there is not even a word for it. The dominant view is that those involved in the creation and revision of international laws, treaties, agreements, or conventions or of intergovernmental agencies and organizations are morally permitted (and perhaps even required) robustly to advance the interests of their home country in such negotiations. This dominant view is tolerant of such national partiality even in regard to the interpretation, application and enforcement of international laws, treaties, agreements and conventions and in regard to the daily operation of intergovernmental agencies and organizations.

To be sure, heads of UN agencies and members of the WTO Appellate Body are expected to follow the relevant international rules and to give weight to the legitimate interests of countries other than their own. But it is widely expected and accepted that such persons give disproportionate weight to the interests of their own country and its governing elites. And in the context of such wide acceptance, these persons do in fact often and blatantly favor their home country in ways that would be met with near-unanimous condemnation at the national level. National governments consequently expend considerable efforts on filling important such positions with a compatriot. Consider the extreme length to which the US government regularly goes to ensure that the President of the World Bank will be one of their own. This effort stands in stark contrast to the effort that the government and citizens of Texas expend toward ensuring that the US President will be someone from Texas. The difference cannot be explained by the greater power and influence of the President of the World Bank – on the contrary! Rather, the difference is primarily explained by the fact that state officials and citizens throughout the US know that the President of the United States will not and politically could not substantially favor the interests of his or her home state; whereas government officials and individuals around the world well understand that the President of the World Bank will run the Bank to promote US economic and political interests and US ideological commitments, and that such conduct will be expected and accepted by the global elites and replicated by other inter-governmental officials and national governments.³⁰

A global impartiality requirement is then, relative to the status quo, a quite radical proposal and yet also one that is quite obviously continuous with the national impartiality requirements that are widely accepted – at least in word if not always in deed – in the more developed societies. Its widespread acceptance around the world could slow and perhaps even reverse the inequality spiral discussed earlier, and such acceptance is politically not unrealistic once people understand that supranational institutional arrangements and governance organizations have become highly influential in their distributive effects and rather similar in their authority and functioning to national institutional arrangements and governmental agencies. As in the corresponding national historical processes, moral insight can be reinforced by a prudential appreciation of the collective costs imposed by national nepotism.

What we cannot count on in the global case, though, are the competitive pressures that have probably played a substantial role in the historical achievement of an unnatural but now (in some countries) widely accepted national impartiality requirement. It is clear enough that the global governance structures that have grown by leaps and bounds in the decades since the end of the Cold War – infested as they are with national nepotism – will not be able to solve the challenges facing human civilization. Foremost among these challenges are the threats posed by nationally controlled advanced weapons and other dangerous technologies, the threats of ecological catastrophe through climate change or resource depletion and the threats posed by supranational lobbying which results in inefficient and unstable supranational institutional arrangements that can lead to massive economic collapse. If humanity is to master these existential challenges, we must learn to reject national nepotism and to expunge it from our supranational rule making and international organizations. Given the magnitude of the threats, it would be good if we could get on with this learning before disaster strikes.

Now rules, procedures and other institutional arrangements are not living, accountable creatures who could be expected to conform themselves to moral standards. Rather, their character and effects depend on the human agents who formulate, shape, design, interpret, apply, enforce, obey, violate, undermine or ignore them. Thus, moral prescriptions about what criteria rules and practices ought to meet must ultimately be cashed out as moral prescriptions addressed to human agents and, specifically, to the conduct of human agents in regard to such rules and practices. And similarly for moral prescriptions addressed to collective agents such as governments and international organizations. The global impartiality requirement is ultimately, then, a differentiation in the standards of moral assessment applying to the conduct of individual human agents. While they may and should give priority to their near and dear in their personal conduct and to their home country when they represent it in a fairly structured competitive context, they must be required to be suitably impartial in contexts where they – as individuals or in some official role or on behalf of a state or enterprise – contribute to the formulation, interpretation or implementation of global rules and procedures. In such contexts, their sole concern must be that these rules and practices, collectively, are fair, that is, justifiable by reference to the equally-weighted needs and interests of all human beings. This requirement is strong and extensive enough to ensure that, if most of us honor it, then the ensemble of supranational institutional arrangements will have the requisite impartiality, organizing a genuine cosmopolis in which countries, enterprises and individuals can cooperate and compete on a level playing field.

Given the high priority human rights enjoy over other human needs and interests, a global institutional order that is fair as defined would be one under which human rights would be realized insofar as reasonably possible – though such a global order would also go far beyond mere universal human-rights fulfillment. We might plausibly seek to approach such a cosmopolis by starting with a weaker impartiality requirement confined to human rights: insofar as human agents are involved in shaping and implementing supranational institutional arrangements, they must give equal weight to the human rights of all human beings and, in particular, no special weight to the human rights of their compatriots. This preliminary and weaker impartiality requirement would require persons, in the relevant contexts, to give to the human rights of non-compatriots as much weight as they give to the human rights of compatriots, while still allowing them to prioritize other needs and interests of their own country and compatriots.

The global impartiality requirement, the global analogue to anti-nepotism, reinforces then the demand of Article 28 for a global order in which the still enormous human rights deficits of the present would be overcome and human rights be fully realized. But it depicts such a global order not as humanity’s ultimate end but as a stepping stone toward the higher ideal of a universal cosmopolis that would include all human beings as equals in that it would be governed by institutional arrangements and officials firmly committed to giving equal weight to the needs and interests of all human beings worldwide.

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