Global injustice, individual duties and non-ideal institutional circumstances

Abstract

The main questions of this paper are: What duties towards the very poor do the global rich have given that the global institutional order is unjust? Are there duties to institutionalize rights under such non-ideal institutional circumstances? How strong are these duties? My thesis is that what makes duties strong or weak is not that they are positive or negative in the sense derived from the theory of action. Instead of this, the strength of individual duties depends on their reference to basic goods and their specification, which partly depends on existing institutional arrangements as far as feasibility, determinateness, costliness, and efficiency are concerned.