Abstract
This article considers Pablo Gilabert’s attempt to defend against libertarian critics his ambitious argument for basic positive duties of justice to the world’s destitute. The article notes that Gilabert’s argument – and particularly the vocabulary of perfect and imperfect duties that he adopts – has firm roots in the modern natural rights tradition. The article goes on to suggest, however, that Gilabert employs the phrase ‘imperfect duties’ in a manner that is in some tension with the tradition from which it is derived. Indeed, Gilabert’s novel deployment of the phrase contains a number of radical possibilities that are not pursued in his text. The article suggests that Gilabert would do better to break more decisively from a tradition that insists on the essential distinction between justice and charity.
Highlights
Cet article examine la tentative de Pablo Gilabert de défendre, contre la critique libertarienne, l’argument ambitieux selon lequel nous avons des devoirs positifs fondamentaux de justice envers les plus démunis du monde
On the international front one has a hard enough time eliciting from people charity let alone justice. (Readers will note, in passing, that the Canadian government has insisted recently that future projects in international development will be employed to further the interests of Canadian resource extraction companies, which indicates just what charity means today.1) I must admit a certain admiration for Gilabert’s quixotic task, for he is pursuing an ideal on a global level that is currently having a difficult enough time defending itself within the confines of the state. Perhaps this ambitious move is only sensible: the welfare state is on the run facing the disciplining power of mobile capital and out of control debt, so perhaps the only place to go for the welfare state is global
I will suggest that Gilabert might have erred in not following through with the radicalism of his intuitions. Embedded in his idiosyncratic use of natural rights discourse is a radical proposition concerning property rights. He still remains wedded to the basic framework of the modern natural rights tradition—improbably demanding as his political proposals might be, I will suggest that his philosophical program would benefit from an extra dose of audacity
Summary
Chapter three has two targets, Jan Narveson and Thomas Pogge. The debate with Pogge is more of a friend’s quarrel; it is in the section on Narveson that the sparks truly fly. Gilabert urges Pogge to stop trying to appeal to libertarians by adopting their highly limited principle of justice and go the whole way to adopting a view of positive duties towards the poor, a position which would contribute more to the lasting and complete eradication of poverty It is Narveson with whom Gilabert most has to quarrel, for Narveson does not merely adopt the doctrine of negative duties strategically—he gives an account of them that follows a style of contractualist argument that is close enough to Gilabert’s own method to bear comparison (though it differs sufficiently to give birth to radically different conclusions). The very point of establishing these universal duties of justice is to place them beyond the vagaries of particular democratic wills
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