We live in a world of radical inequality: Hundreds of millions suffer severe, lifelong poverty, causing some 18 Million early deaths annually from malnutrition and diseases that are very easy and cheap to cure. Many others are quite well off and affluent enough significantly to improve the lives of the global poor. Does this radical inequality constitute an injustice in which we are involved? An affirmative answer finds broad support in different strands of the Western moral tradition, which also support the same program of institutional reform. This reform centers around a Global Resources Dividend, or GRD. Humankind at large is to be viewed as owning a minority stake in the resources of this planet (including air, water and soil, which are used for the discharging of pollutants). As with preferred stock, this stake does not entitle everyone to participate in deciding how resources are to be used; this authority is to remain with the states in whose territory resources are located. But the stake does entitle all to a share of the economic benefits of resource utilization. Since the global poor are otherwise excluded from such a share, the funds raised through the GRD are to be spent on their emancipation. A GRD in the amount of one percent of the global social product would currently raise some $300 Billion a year. This amount is too small to lead to economic dislocation (it would even have positive effects by slowing resource depletion and pollution). But it is large enough to eradicate global poverty within one or two decades. Such a reform would, moreover, reassure the poor societies that they need not gain possession of dangerous technologies to have their basic needs taken seriously by the rich. And it could find broad support in different strands of the Western moral tradition: in forward-looking, consequentialist and contractualist approaches; in Lockean approaches that require that economic institutions render no one worse off than anyone would be in his state of nature with a proportionate resource share; and in backward-looking approaches that object to radical inequalities when these have arisen through a deeply tarnished historical process.
