Addressing Global Poverty and Inequality: a Kantian Perspective

This paper essentially aims to clarify Kant’s conception of “global distributive justice”. The argument I defend is threefold. Firstly, Kant supports a duty of international distributive justice understood as a duty to establish an international rightful condition in which the rights of every state are protected by public laws. Unlike some commentators, I argue that these rights include both the innate and the acquired rights of states, that is, their right to political self-determination and their territorial rights. Secondly, insofar as Kant favours a coalition which states are free to enter and to leave at any moment, the rights of states – and by the same token the rights of their individual members – will never be able to hold in a ‘conclusive’ way. They are condemned to remain ‘provisionally rightful’ provided however they are exercised in a way that is compatible with the possibility of a rightful condition. I interpret this requirement of compatibility by referring to Kant’s notion of “formal wrong”: states may not act on maxims that make it impossible to leave the state of nature (they may, for instance, not refuse to juridify certain aspects of their interactions) or that involve a return to the state of nature (they may, for instance, not refuse to respect existing international public laws). I also show how, by giving to the rights of states an indefinitely provisional character, Kant’s conception of global distributive justice assumes a fundamentally prospective dimension. Thirdly, the fact that the international rightful condition must continually tend to conform to the idea of the original contract reinforces this prospective dimension while giving it an egalitarian character. The egalitarianism in question is admittedly not related to result, but rather to justification. It requires that international public laws be defined in such a way that they could have arisen from the united will of the entire community of states. Existing laws that cannot be the subject of such ‘possible consent’ are not conform to right and must whenever possible be amended. But in the meantime, they must be respected because it is better to have a defective international law than a lawless international state. I conclude by discussing some of the implications of this argument in terms of global poverty and inequality.