Ars Vivendi Journal No. 6 (March 2014): 1-2

PrefaceAkira INOUE**Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto,
Japan

This special issue mainly focuses on questions of global justice and ethics. Since
Thomas Pogge’s canonical work, World Poverty and Human Rights (first edition,2002; second edition, 2008), was published, global justice and ethics have become
important issues in political philosophy, that are mainly concerned with how
conceptions of justice and morality can be applied to global poverty. Pogge’s famousand powerful argument, which demonstrates that the existing international order is so
severely unjust that the wealthy nations (including Japan) cannot avoid fulfilling anegative duty to save the global poor through correcting the intuitional scheme such asa Global Resource Dividend (GRD), is undoubtedly a starting point for mostphilosophical discussions about global justice and ethics. This is true of two essays
contributed to this special issue.
In the first essay, Akira Abe argues that Richard Rorty’s argument on global ethics
can be employed in order to solve the problem of distance in global justice. Abe argues
in line with Rorty that moral sentiment plays an essential role in extending oursolidarity with distant and different others. However, since our capacity for sympathy is
cognitively and psychologically limited, a duty owed to the global poor may not fully beguaranteed by the extension of our sympathetic concern for distant and different others.
By an appeal to Christopher Voparil’s contention, Abe emphasizes the importance ofturning our attention to the reality of suffering rather than to the possibility ofextended loyalty. The fact that people in distant locations are suffering motivates us tourgently deal with their painful situation in some way or other. Abe contends that thisis key to overcoming the emotional distance between the rich and the poor.
The second essay by Shinji Murakami purports to show a complementarity
between capabilities and resources in designing distributive rules in the (global)
institutions. As is well known, there has been long-lasting discussion over the metric ofjustice and equality; capabilities and resources are the most powerful candidates forsuch metric. While Amartya Sen and his followers favor the former in ways that attend
to a radical diversity of capabilities to convert resources into welfare, or, more precisely,welfare to freely achieve, Pogge defends a resourcist approach that can reasonably
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recognize the difference in a person’s mental and physical capacities because of theirsocially shaped characteristics. Although Murakami takes the side of the capability
approach at the fundamental level, he admits that in evaluating effective distributiverules, we cannot ignore the following difficulty in using capabilities as a metric of global
justice: while the capability approach can reflect people’s different capacities ofenjoying resources, it may involve the extremely complex process of evaluating
information concerning them. With this in mind, Murakami proposes the two-layered
distributive rules: the first-layered rule, which is sensitive to people’s pursing various
goals of their own lives, depends upon the GRD, whereas the second-layered rule,
which is sensitive to a more basic level of people’s lives, is endorsed by the capability
approach. This two-layered setting is, Murakami contends, more plausible than theGRD, because while it is feasible in virtue of the two-layered system, it is more sensitive
to a variety of people’s basic needs.
***
These two essays convince us that Thomas Pogge’s argument developed in World
Poverty and Human Rights is not just influential, but also essentially important inconstructing rigorous theories of global justice and ethics. The translation of its second
edition into Japanese (published in 2010) is a major contribution to the field of global
justice and ethics in Japan. Shinya Tateiwa, who is a supervisor of the translation
project, will contribute a critical notice of Pogge’s book to the next issue.

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