What Do the Richest Countries Owe to the World’s Poorest?

Abstract

In the philosophical literature on global justice, there has been a long debate about what the world’s richest countries owe to the citizens of the poorest countries. While some have argued that rich countries have positive charitable duties to help poorer ones, others have asserted that richest countries only have negative obligations that consist on not doing them any harm. In this article, three positions are presented, interrogated and challenged: Neoliberalism, State liberalism, and global justice theorists. The purpose of this article is to investigate whether it is possible to establish some kind of responsibility for the damage caused to the poorest countries by the richest ones,  or what kind of responsibility can be attributed to certain actors such as governments, multinationals, and local elites. The aim is to analyze the liberal conceptions of redistributive justice, because they do not take into account the structural problems of power that determine injustices, and to propose a post-liberal vision of justice that serves the purpose of transforming dominant power relations.