Emerton, Patrick --- "International Economic Justice: Is a Principled Liberalism Possible?" [2009] ELECD 548; in Joseph, Sarah; Kinley, David; Waincymer, Jeff (eds), "The World Trade Organization and Human Rights" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009)

Book Title: The World Trade Organization and Human Rights

Editor(s): Joseph, Sarah; Kinley, David; Waincymer, Jeff

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847206619

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: International Economic Justice: Is a Principled Liberalism Possible?

Author(s): Emerton, Patrick

Number of pages: 30

Extract:

6. International economic justice:
is a principled liberalism possible?
Patrick Emerton
Ted Honderich writes:

What is a good life? For a start, a good life is one that goes on long enough [. . .]
Some people, because of their societies, have average lifetimes of about seventy-
eight years. Some other people, because of their different societies, live on average
about forty years [. . .] [M]any people in the second group, those people who pull
its average down to forty [. . .] have half-lives at best [. . .] The first group are in fact
the populations of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France,
Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark and Japan. The second group are the populations
of the African countries of Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Sierra Leone.1

Honderich's figures are drawn from the The World Guide 2001­2002. The
figures in the 2005­2006 edition show that those in the first group have aver-
age life expectancies of 78.6 years, those in the second group 36.2 years.2 Less
than half-lives.
Radical differences in life expectancy are not all there is to this radical
inequality; Thomas Pogge, for example, draws our attention to the obvious
cause of half-lives, and of much other suffering as well, namely, extreme
poverty.3 Whatever facts we take to best exemplify this inequality, such human
suffering is plainly a matter of deep moral concern. But a consideration of life
expectancies, or of inequalities of wealth and income, does not tell us exactly
how, at the ...