Modelo geométrico de la llanta DT SWISS RR 511 y sus componentes

The entitlement theory makes no room for responsibilities of this kind, or if it does, it does not regard them as institutionally or legally enforceable (for its proponents might allow that we have unenforceable responsibilities to provide charitable aid to the global poor, as we noted earlier). The entitlement theory thus assumes that the only forms of responsibility to others that justice permits political institutions to enforce are those that involve culpability for wrongdoing. Applied to the issue of global depriva- tion, this view implies that affluent individuals bear an enforceable respon- sibility to assist disadvantaged people only to the extent that they have culpably violated their property rights or the Lockean proviso.

But why should we believe this? Why should the scope of social and economic justice be restricted in this way? Since the entitlement theory assumes it, we cannot, without begging the question, use that theory to defend this view about the scope of justice. Libertarians must present an independent argument for their contention that claims to organized assistance may justly arise only when individuals are guilty of having wronged someone or of violating the Lockean proviso.

One suggestion that libertarians sometimes make here is that the only conceivable alternatives to their own view must appeal to problematic notions of collective culpability.22 On such views, the affluent as a group,

21 _{Sen (2000), pp. 282 3.} 22

or institutions like Western liberal democratic states that act in the name of affluent groups of people, are somehow collectively culpable for wrongfully harming the global poor. Marxists have sometimes advanced this argument with respect to the conditions of the working class. For example, Engels wrote:

Murder has been committed if society places hundreds of workers in such a position that they inevitably come to premature and unnatural ends. Murder has been committed if society knows perfectly well that thousands of workers cannot avoid being sacrificed as long as these conditions are allowed to continue. . . if a worker dies no one places the responsibility for his death on society, though some would realize that society has failed to take steps to prevent the victim from dying. But it is murder all the same.23

Engels’s description of these purported wrongs as ‘‘murder’’ is clearly rhetorical. Still, we cannot simply dismiss the idea that these deaths might be collective wrongs of some kind. And, if sound, such considerations naturally apply to the relation between affluent and poor societies in the present global order.

But, as libertarians often insist, suggestions along these lines are open to two kinds of objection. First, they require that we treat failing to prevent certain harms as equivalent to directly causing them. But many are uneasy about collapsing this distinction between actions and ‘‘omissions.’’ It under- mines our ordinary intuitions about responsibility, according to which there is an important moral difference between directly injuring someone and failing to intervene to prevent harms that will take place but for one’s intervention.

Second, these arguments assume that we can make sense of group responsibility, of the idea that collectivities as such, as opposed to the individuals who make them up, can be blamed for wrongful actions. But such notions of group agency and collective blame for wrongdoing are mysterious. We might worry that, when indulged, they indiscriminately and unfairly burden entirely innocent individuals with liability for ‘‘collective’’ wrongdoing.

It is not clear that these objections are decisive. Perhaps some suitably fair and discriminating theory of collective culpability can be worked out;

and perhaps as utilitarians have often urged we should on reflection abandon the intuitively attractive distinction between actions and omissions.

But even if these objections were decisive, this would not suffice to defend the libertarian view. Rejecting the ‘‘collective-culpability’’ argument would vindicate the entitlement theory only if these were the only two plausible views available. But this is manifestly false. There is at least one other alternative. According to this alternative, arguments for organized transfers of wealth from the affluent to the global poor depend neither on the claim that anyone (whether individuals or groups) is culpable for wrongdoing nor on the claim that such transfers are directly required by justice. But whether or not they are required by justice, there remains the possibility that such transfers should nonetheless not be ruled out as unjust. After all, we might want to insist, in the spirit of Sen’s comments, that any adequate conception of justice ought at least to permit the enforcement of positive social responsibilities of the sort he identifies in that passage. I will call this the Permission View.

The entitlement theory excludes the Permission View. For as we have seen, that theory asserts that forced redistribution can be justified only when those forced to contribute can be shown to be culpable for wronging someone or violating the Lockean proviso. Otherwise, their rights to their own property preempt any further coercive transfers of wealth. In contrast, the Permission View denies that the claims of affluent property-owners enjoy this overwhelming priority over the urgent needs of the severely disadvantaged. Under the Permission View, whether or not affluent individ- uals have wronged anyone, there is no reason to regard requiring them to provide assistance to the global poor as itself unjust.

Again, on a Permission View, the case for imposing such enforceable obligations on the affluent need not assume that justice mandates them. The argument may simply rest on the surely uncontroversial claim that it would be a good thing if individuals and institutions assumed responsibility for eliminating severe poverty and deprivation around the world. Since few would dispute that claim, insisting that this is also something required by justice seems unnecessary anyway. So we do not need to embrace mys- terious notions of collective culpability in order to oppose the libertarian view. Nor need we maintain that affluent individuals have wronged anyone. We need only point out that libertarians still owe us an argument for their

contention that justice prohibits all efforts to relieve severe deprivation and poverty by coercive means except when required to rectify culpable violations of individuals’ property rights or of the Lockean proviso.