我们是否在侵犯世界穷人的人权?(下)

Are We Violating the Human Rights of the World's Poor?

人权的侵犯涉及人权的不实现和人类行动者与这种不实现之间特定的、主动的因果关系。这种因果关系可能是互动性的;但当行动者联合设计和施加一些制度安排,以此造成人权的可预见和可避免的不实现时,这种因果关系也可能是制度性的。现有证据表明:一、大约一半的世界人口,其基本的社会和经济人权尚未得到实现;二、较穷一半的人类正在遭受全球家庭收入份额的迅速下降(目前份额低于3%),就其原因而言,超国家层面的制度安排承担重要责任。因此,有充分的理由可以说,像我一样的人——有影响力国家的富裕公民——联合起来大规模侵犯了全球穷人的人权。我们多数人会觉得这个结论显然是错误的,但这并不能抹杀这个结论,因为他们既没有调查人权不实现的制度性原因,也没有研究相关制度改革的可能性。

A human rights violation involves unfulfilled human rights and a specific active causal relation of human agents to such non-fulfillment. This causal relation may be interactional; but it may also be institutional, as when agents collaborate in designing and imposing institutional arrangements that foreseeably and avoidably cause human rights to be unfulfilled. Readily available evidence suggests that(a) basic social and economic human rights remain unfulfilled for around half the world's population and(b) the design of supranational institutional arrangement plays a major role in explaining why the poorer half of humanity is suffering a rapid decline in its share(now below three percent) of global household income. A strong case can be made, then, that people like myself – well-to-do citizens of influential states – collaboratively violate the human rights of the global poor on a massive scale. That most of us find this conclusion obviously mistaken does not discredit it because they have not investigated the institutional causes of the non-fulfillment of human rights nor relevant institutional reform possibilities.