CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

364 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
his thesis internationally with The Law of Peoples, published in 1999.
Drawing again on the model of the original position and the veil of ignorance,
representatives of well-ordered societies would negotiate the terms of
association between their peoples, likely to include respecting freedom and
independence, observing treaties, honoring human rights, not intervening
in each other’s affairs, and helping people living under unfavorable conditions.
Rawls is less surefooted in the global arena, and others have taken up
the challenge of extending his concepts of justice as fairness to the world
community.
Thousands of papers and books have been written on Rawls’ Theory of
Justice and his other works, and it is beyond my intent to critique this
monumental set of commentaries. Suffice it to say that praise has been exceptionally
effusive, and criticisms have typically focused on issues in his
methodology. Rawls salvaged moral and political philosophy from the
deep freeze into which they had fallen and laid down, supported by other
writers, a powerful criticism of utilitarianism from which it probably cannot
recover.
Among dozens of philosophers who have agreed with, expanded upon,
or taken exception to Rawls’ thinking, I comment on the works of just two.
Robert Nozick, also at Harvard, offered in response to Rawls a libertarian
perspective with Anarchy, State, and Utopia published in 1974. His “entitlement
theory” regarding holdings of wealth and property requires (1) justice
in acquisitions, (2) justice in transfers, and (3) rectification in situations
where (1) or (2) is unjust. With rectification as a principle, should it then be
assumed that libertarians favor returning trillions of dollars of ill-gotten and
illegally transferred wealth back to poorer countries and cancellation of the
foreign debts of impoverished nations?
Thomas Pogge, earlier encountered in Chapter 5, at Columbia University
has been called an “ultra-Rawlsian philosopher,” extending justice as fairness
quite determinedly into the realm of relations of all peoples in the global
society, not merely relations between states. Among his many writings, Realizing
Rawls published in 1989 is dedicated to his former teacher at Harvard.
Pogge challenges the view that “. . . truly grievous injustices exist only in the
past or in distant lands and so need not concern us here and now. I conclude
that we are advantaged participants in an institutional scheme that produces
extreme poverty on a massive scale so that many persons are born with no realistic
prospects of a life without hunger, malnutrition, and oppression. The