Abstract

Since his Realizing Rawls a decade and a half ago, Thomas Pogge has established himself as one of the most important and influential writers on the subject of global justice in contemporary philosophy. World Poverty and Human Rights is a valuable collection of some of his essays written during 1990–2001. These essays cover various central topics of global justice—from fundamental philosophical ones, such as the concept of justice and human rights and the universalistic nature of moral reasoning, to the more concrete questions of global institutional reforms. The specific topics addressed include human rights, nationalism, state sovereignty and cosmopolitanism, global democratic deficit, and Pogge’s original proposal for a global resource dividend that will provide a global development fund through taxing natural resource extraction. An unfortunate omission here is the absence of Pogge’s essay-length commentary on John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples. Although there are extensive discussions of Rawls in the book, including this essay would have helped the reader better situate Pogge’s account of global justice against Rawls’s well-known theory.