Thomas Pogge

Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge (born 1953) is a philosopher and currently Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University and Research Director at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University with a dissertation supervised by John Rawls. Pogge serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs journal, Ethics & International Affairs, and is an Ethics and Debt Project participant.

Pogge has written extensively on political philosophy, especially on Rawls, Immanuel Kant, cosmopolitanism, and, more recently, extreme poverty. His book World Poverty and Human Rights is widely regarded as one of the most important works on global justice. Pogge's work has been, along with that of Charles Beitz, one of the most important in the "first wave" of work on global justice. Yet what makes Pogge's contribution to the debate on global justice and the eradication of world poverty original is his emphasis on negative duties rather than on the positive duties stressed by Beitz. According to Pogge, the global rich have a stringent duty of justice to take decisive steps toward the eradication of global poverty primarily because they have violated the negative duty not to contribute to the imposition of a global institutional order that foreseeably and avoidably renders the basic socioeconomic rights of other human beings unfulfilled, and not because they must honor a positive duty to help others in need when they can at little cost to themselves.

Health Impact Fund

Pogge, with University of Calgary economist Aidan Hollis, is currently spearheading an initiative to establish a Health Impact Fund. This Fund would pool contributions from international governments in order to allow pharmaceutical companies to register new medicines and treatments in order to receive direct payment proportional to their impact on global health - provided that the products are sold at cost. The executive summary for the Health Impact Fund project brief lays out the system as follows :

"The Health Impact Fund (HIF) is a new proposal based on two simple insights: (1) privately funded pharmaceutical R&D responds to incentives, and (2) new drugs can have a much larger impact if their prices are low. At present, the most profitable research efforts are not the ones most needed to alleviate the global burden of disease. And high prices often put new drugs out of reach of most of the world’s population. The HIF seeks to correct both of these failings by offering to reward any new medicine, if priced at cost, on the basis of its global health impact. Any firm receiving marketing approval for a new medicine would be offered a choice between (a) exercising its usual patent rights through high prices or (b) registering its product with the HIF. Registration would require the firm to sell its product worldwide at an administered price near the average cost of production and distribution. In exchange, the firm would receive from the HIF a stream of payments based on the assessed global health impact of its drug. The HIF is, in other words, an optional pay-for-performance scheme for new pharmaceuticals"

The HIF is still in the early stages of development after its recent inauguration in Oslo, but Hollis and Pogge estimate that about $6bn a year would be required in order to make the fund an attractive incentive for pharmaceutical companies, and suggest that affluent countries could commit to contributing 0.03% of their gross national income.

Selected bibliography

By Pogge

• Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).
• John Rawls (München: C. H. Beck Verlag, 1994).
• "Eradicating Systemic Poverty: brief for a global resources dividend" Journal of Human Development Vol. 2 No. 1, 2001
• “Recognized and Violated by International Law: The Human Rights of the Global Poor” Leiden Journal of International Law 18/4 (2005).
• John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice, trans. Michelle Kosch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
• (with Christian Barry) Global Institutions and Responsibilities: Achieving Global Justice. (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2006).
• (ed.) Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who owes what to the very poor? (Oxford UP, 2007)

About Pogge

• Hugh Lafollette, Review of World Poverty and Human Rights, Ethics 113/4(2003).

External links

• Website at Yale University
• Symposium on Pogge's book. Includes several online papers by and about Pogge.
• A UNU Conversation with Thomas Pogge. A video interview conducted at the United Nations University.
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