Pogge

I found chapter five to be very interesting. I found him to be saying in 5.1 that the notion of nationalism has been taken to the extreme and by this, is in fact contributing to the problem from within. National partiality and family partiality are being tied up in one and create an unlevel playing field universally. Part of the problem is that compatriots, he argues, should take priority over foreigners, but under the current system is unacceptable. The solution, at least what he thinks, is that we need to get the current international playing field to look like that of some national playing fields, and get the partiality towards families altered along with the international playing field for compatriots. But the people who are establishing such an economic global order, have families that need to stay out of the global picture; while making their nation priority and considering the global status. Not an easy task…

He is now looking for a justification when practicing national partiality. But he must prove that the global economic problem is in large part traced back to the national stage. I like his example of how if a mom comes upon their child and they are hurt they give them priority over the others, but if the child’s injuries along with his friends injuries are the mothers fault, then priority goes to the child’s friends. “When the undue harms foreigners suffer are our own wrong doing, foreigners and compatriots are on par.”(139) and essentially he goes on to say that by honoring this (previous example) is not disloyal to one’s country. Our positive duty toward others is greater when dealing with compatriots, but our negative duty when it is our own doing is equivalent when dealing with foreigners. He goes on to challenge the first world citizen’s belief, that which is a positive duty to help the poor, not a negative one.

He says that the ‘common notion’ of poverty rests largely on the assumption that it is their own governments fault and short-coming to their own citizens and that the other wealthy nations do not have a positive duty to help and our negative duty is not the problem. Many of the people who are in the poverty stricken areas, he says are children and do not choose this for themselves. So the common assumption that they have chosen this or chosen their leaders or what not, is regardless of the fact that people don’t choose poverty. Another big problem is that when new leaders come into power, they inherit a mountain of debt from previous dictators and are essentially shut out of international financial markets. He puts forth a couple suggestions on what could be done but does he ever put forth how it is to be done?

Many things needed to be reformed or established, he argues, to bring an end to this problem. As Mike has pointed out, concerning his comparison to Nazi German, I found it to be a very BOLD statement (but possibly (?) very true). “And if this is how we must think about most Germans in the early 1940s, then this how we must surely think about ourselves.”(151) this is somewhat scary and repulsive, if this statement does indeed hold legitimacy, to compare our actions (or lack thereof) with the Germans in WWII.