The proposed paper seeks to explore the nature of individual participation and complicity in global injustice through a Kant-inspired analysis of individual duties of justice under non-institutional circumstances. It thereby focuses on Pogge’s influential – and prima facie convincing – argument that through our participation in an unjust global structure we violate our negative duties not to harm others (e.g. Pogge 2005). Such an account has primarily come under attack for two reasons, the first being the indirect and causally controversial nature of our participation in unjust organisational structures (is my being a member of a powerful state dominating powerless states in itself an injustice I commit?) and the second being the overdemanding nature of our duties such conceived (can I really be held accountable for all „new harms“ I indirectly bring about? For arguments of both types see e.g. Lichtenberg 2010). The proposed paper aims at explaining how both – Pogge’s moral analysis and the intuitively convincing objections to it – can be reconciled by adopting a Kantian framework regarding the injustice of a lacking system of lawful institutions (or background justice, Ronzoni 2009). From the Kantian outlook proposed, the problem does not consist in our participation in an unjust structure, but in the lack of any structure deserving the name of a global institutional structure and being in the position to remedy the effects of individual interaction. This lack helps us explain both objections. In the absence of global institutions, we face severe epistemic problems concerning a.) the detection of rights and thus injustices, b.) the detection of the cumulative effects of individual choices, c.) a lack of reliability of expectation regarding the choices of others. Under these conditions our moral duty not to harm others through participation in an unjust structure of coexistence still stands, but cannot be fulfilled for epistemic and practical reasons.
