Introduction
This paper aims to address the motivational problem that is at the heart of global justice issues. I shall begin with a recognition of the fact that there are presently billions of lives suffering from challenges to health and well-being. I shall argue that people‘s detached responses and indifference towards the suffering of others result from a motivational vacuum that exists within considerations of global justice issues. Therefore, I will examine three possible motivations for action on issues of justice: human rights discourse, causal responsibilities, and compassion. First, I shall argue that human rights discourse, even though it has powerful rhetorical influences in international politics, faces a challenge from cultural relativism and suspicion of its claims to universality. Secondly, I shall consider the causal responsibilities analysis offered by Thomas Pogge. Although the causal responsibilities analysis persuasively assigns moral responsibilities to people in the affluent countries, I shall argue, it still leaves two challenges unaddressed: one concerning human suffering that cannot be blamed on other humans, such as those that result from natural disasters and genetic disabilities. A second problem is that Pogge‘s view seems to deny people of less affluent countries any agency in the pursuit of global social justice. Thirdly, I shall consider the human emotion of compassion. I argue that an emotional motivation, as a supplement to the other two motivations, delivers deeper and more broadly shared concerns for various human sufferings and a more promising platform for action. I shall end with some concluding remarks. 2

1. Human suffering and motivational problem

In our globalizing world, while many of us enjoy lives of comfort, there are still billions of people facing life-threatening obstacles around the planet. David Miller clearly asserts this fact at the beginning of his ―Distributing Responsibilities‖: ―Our world contains too many instances of deprived and suffering people—people whose…security, or subsistence or health care are not being protected, and who as a result are in no position to live minimal decent lives.‖1 Thomas Pogge similarly points out:
1 Miller, 2001,p.453
2 Pogge, 2005b, p.92
3 Miller, 2001, p.453.
―In [the fifteen years since the end of the Cold War], billions of people have suffered greatly from poverty-related causes: from hunger and malnutrition, from child labor and trafficking, from lack of access to basic health care and safe drinking water, from lack of shelter, basic sanitation, electricity, and elementary education. Some 18 million people have died prematurely each year from poverty-related causes, accounting for fully one third of all human deaths.‖ 2
It is obvious that in the present age there exist severe deprivation and human suffering that thwart people‘s lives. Let us suppose that it is morally wrong and intolerable to allow the sufferings continue, as Miller argues that ―nearly all of us believe that this is a situation that demands a remedy: someone should provide the resources to end the suffering and deprivation.‖3 This assertion only begs the question: who should be 3

the ‗someone‘?
Many people still show detached and indifferent reactions when confronted with the challenge to alleviate human sufferings: that is nobody thinks that he/she is the ―somebody‖ who ought to take action to alleviate suffering. All too often we want to see ourselves as unconnected to the unimaginable deprivation of other humans and tend to regard the world‘s human suffering with self-satisfied detachment.
The detachment may result from distance and lack of personal connections to sufferers. Toni Erskine aptly argues that it is an important question of
―how we get from where we are currently standing, steeping in our own immediate circumstances, with our own particular ties and commitments, to concern for those with whom we share neither kinship nor country, neighbourhood nor nation.‖4
4 Toni Erskine, ―‘Citizen of Nowhere‘ or ‗The Point Where Circles Intersect?‘ Impartialist and Embedded Cosmopolitanism,‖ Reviews of International Studies, 28(3), 2002, p.457-78.
In other words, humans always have a problem putting the lives of distant ―strangers‖ into our prior concerns, especially when global justice deals with the lives of people, who we have never met and are never likely to meet in our lives. Alternatively, we might consider that there are too many possible agents who could respond to the requests, and we do not identify ourselves to be the particular agents who have the responsibility of helping.
Consequently, moral arguments in favour of global justice seem ineffective, because, 4

as Miller points out: ―There is a danger that the suffering or the deprivation will continue unabated, even though everyone agrees that it is morally intolerable, because no-one is willing to accept the responsibility to step in and relieve it.‖
Clearly, there is a motivational problem at the heart of global justice issues. We have failed to address what exactly triggers people‘s motivation to turn their intellectual convictions into a determination to act. Andrew Dobson notes that ―there are limits to cosmopolitanism‘s persuasiveness as long as its motivational heart remains unexamined.‖5
5 Dobson, 2006, p.165
6 Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essay on Reason, God, and Modernity, Eduardo Mendieta, ed, MIT Press, 2002, p.153-154.
1. The First Possible Motivation: Human rights discourse

Arguably, the most powerful political rhetoric in our time comes from the human rights discourse. Human rights, as a moral discourse, dominate international law and politics. They constitute the basic normative discourse that addresses human suffering. People and organizations are easily motivated around claims of human rights violation. As Jürgen Habermas points out:
―Notwithstanding their European origins, human rights now compose the universal language in which global commercial relationships comes under normative regulation. In Asia, Africa, and South America, [human rights] also constitute the only language in which the opponents and victims of murderous regime and civil wars can raise their voices against violence, repression, and persecution, and injuries to their human dignity.‖6 5

Costa Douzinas also acknowledges the powerful and ubiquitous character of rights discourse in the international arena. He says: ―human rights…have become the morality and ideology of the new world order …. They unite left and right, the pulpit and the state, the minister and the rebel, the North and the South …. Human rights are the key values rearranging the world.‖7
7 Douzinas, 2007, p.177-179.
8 Ibid, p.184
9 Ibid, p.177
He goes on to analyze the benefits of using rights discourses: ―It has many attractions. It is moral, it claims universality and it is, to a certain extent, legally binding. It formed the main rhetorical and ideological weapon of the early humanitarian wars…, it has wide international legitimacy and it can call upon a well-organised international, state and non-governmental institutional structure.‖8 Douzinas concludes: ―Human rights have become the driving force of international relations, a way of conducting politics according to ethical norms….Its signs are everywhere.‖9 In sum, whenever people waive the flag of human rights, they draw the attention from the rights believers worldwide and have the power and resources from international laws and organizations.
However, human rights discourse has never been immune from controversies. First of all, the idea of human rights itself is ―by no means a crystal clear idea.‖ Rights have been understood and interpreted in many different ways, and there are always difficult theoretical questions and philosophical disagreements about the use of rights language. As Martha Nussbaum clearly points out: 6

―People differ about what the basis of a rights claim is: rationality, sentience, and mere life have all had their defenders. They differ, too, about whether rights are pre-political or artifacts of laws and institutions….They differ about whether rights belong only to individual persons, or also groups. They differ about whether rights are to be regarded as side-constraints on goal-promoting action, or instead as one part of the social goals being promoted. They differ, again, about the relationship between rights and duties…They differ, finally, about what rights are to be understood as rights to?‖10
10 Nussbaum, 2000, p.97
11 Ibid, p.35
In sum, even within the Western tradition in which the prevalent conception of rights was born, there have been ongoing theoretical debates about the definition of human rights.
Moreover, human rights discourse becomes more problematic when it claims universality. The concept of universal human rights is frequently challenged as the imposition of Western values onto non-Western cultural traditions. ―The suspicion uneasily grows,‖ that the defenders of universal human rights are ―imposing something on people who surely have their own ideas of what is right and proper.‖ And this suspicion grates even more unpleasantly when people are reminded that the conception of universal human rights originates in nations that have historically been oppressors. ―Isn‘t all this philosophizing, then, simply one more exercise in colonial domination?‖11
Costa Douzinas offers a powerful criticism of the evolution of human rights in 7

modern legal frameworks, which, in his estimation, has been one of domination of the weak by the strong: ―After the Second World War, the victorious powers fought tooth and nail over the definitions and priorities of human rights (civil against economic, individual against collective).‖12 ―Human rights and good governance clauses are routinely imposed by the West on developing countries as a precondition for trade and aid agreements. Human rights appear to have triumphed in the world.‖13 The apparently imperialistic character of human rights discourse is most obvious when we consider that ―the agenda for the codification of human rights was set by the great powers and in particular the United States.‖14
12 Douzinas, 2007, p.179.
13 Ibid, p.177.
14 Ibid, p.180.
The concept of human rights, which is associated with the European Enlightenment, is admittedly a product of the West. Therefore, the application of universal human rights faces formidable resistances from various non-Western cultural contexts.
There is always a vigorous and troublesome debate between the respective defenders of universalism and cultural relativism about the cross-cultural applicability of human rights discourse. The debate takes place within UN committees, academic discussions, as well as real world practices. It relates to the rights of the child, rights of women, as well as the rights of cultural groups. It becomes a crucial and difficult puzzle for contemporary theorists who are eager to find possible solutions.
Given its controversy theoretical definition and contestable application in practices, universal human rights discourse is gradually losing its credibility under close scrutiny. As Douzinas summarizes: 8

―the critics argue that human rights provisions are indeterminate restrictions; that rights are inescapably involved in conflicts with other rights (freedom against security, expression against privacy) or with the same rights of others; that their open-ended language means that they acquire meaning and effects in acts of interpretation and application, in which all kinds of non-principled considerations are involved; finally, that the context of application is much more important than the provisions.‖15
15 Douzinas, 2007, p.188
16 Ibid, p.195
17 Ibid, p.181.
18 Ibid, p.183.
Consequently, universal human rights ―become the lingua franca of the new times but are unable to eliminate conflict, the formal struggle over human rights will revolve predominantly around their interpretation and application.‖16 Oona Hathaway argues that ―the ratification of such [human rights] treaties by major Western countries and increased advocacy by human rights NGOs not only did not improved conditions in target countries but on the contrary increased violations.‖17
Universal Human Rights operate as an instrument of the leading powers through their own interpretations. As Douzinas points out: ―The most important and violent effect, however, is the use of military force for ‗humanitarian interventions‘ by the United States or American-led coalitions with or without United Nations authorization.‖18 Furthermore, the remaining human sufferings around the world serve as vivid reminders of the inability of human rights discourse to motivate people to achieve global justice. Douzinas argues: 9

―According to the 2000 UN Development report 30,000 children die every day of malnutrition and the life expectancy in sub-Saharan African is thirty-six years. The extreme injustice of global distribution is invisible to cosmopolitan law and reduced to the sphere of private; nature inevitable and humanitarian intervention will not confront the regime of intellectual property that condemns millions of people to death by disease. Poverty, disease, lack of food and clean water, violence against minorities and women, HIV/Aids are the main causes of misery and death in the world. But they are not seen as worthy of ‗humanitarian‘ intervention. They are demoted to the private and domestic, they become an invisible and normalized part of contingencies of life for which not much can be done. They are left to the magnanimity of philanthropists and the goodwill of pop stars. Despite the rhetoric of universal international law only a tiny part of the world comes under its purview and only a few problems of interest to the West are defined as crises.‖19
19 Douzinas, 2007, p.193.
20 Amartya Sen, Develop as Freedom, New York: Knopf, 1999, p.64.
As Amartya Sen powerfully inquires: ―Why should the status of intense economic needs, which can be matters of life and death, be lower than that of personal liberties?‖20 In conclusion, the reluctance of leading powers to recognize and address injustices related to global poverty demonstrates that universal human rights discourse, despite its rhetorical weight in the international arena, is not the ideal motivation for the alleviation of human suffering, because it is always subject to the interpretation of the discourse‘s users.
As Jacques Derrida concludes, ―discourse on human rights and democracy remains 10

little more than an obscene alibi so long as it tolerates the terrible plight of so many millions of human beings suffering from malnutrition, disease and humiliation, grossly deprived not only of bread and water but of equality or freedom.‖21
21 Jacques Derrida, Rogues, Brault and Nass trans, Stanford University Press, 2005, p.86.
22 Pogge, 2005a, p.3-4.
2. Causal Responsibilities: Thomas W. Pogge

As Douzinas, Sen and Derrida all notice, global poverty is the most pressing issue of global justice, which also points out the unreliability of universal human rights discourse as a motivation for action. Thomas W. Pogge, as one of the influential contemporary theorists, focuses most of his work on the global poverty issue.
It has been more than sixty years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proposed in 1948. However, a large segment of humanity is still living in extreme poverty today. As Pogge points out:
―Out of a total of 6.2 billion human beings (2002), some 799 million are malnourished, more than 880 million lack access to basic health service, 1 billion are without adequate shelter, 1.1 billion without assess to safe drinking water, 2 billion without electricity, and 2.4 billion without access to basic sanitation. In addition, 876 million adults are illiterate, and 200 million children between 5 and 14 do wage work outside their house hold, often under harsh or cruel conditions. Some 50,000 human deaths per day, fully a third of all human deaths, are due to poverty related causes.‖22 11

In sum, the global poor suffer from a lack of secure access to food, safe water, clothing, shelter, and basic education, and are highly vulnerable to acts of violence by their government officials as well as by individual agents.
Furthermore, the world‘s poor are not merely living in acute poverty, but also living within a world of sharp inequalities. ―A child born in Sweden today has a life expectancy at birth of 79.7 years. A child born in Sierra Leone has a life expectancy at birth of 38.9 years. In the US, GPA per capita is $34,142 dollars, in Serra Leone, GDA per capita is $490. Adult literacy rates in the top twenty nations are around 99 percent. In Serra Leone, the literacy rate is 36 percent. In twenty-six nations, the adult literacy rate is under 50 percent. ‖23
23 Nussbaum, 2005, p.196
24 Pogge, 2002, p.3
25 Pogge, 2005a, p.4
Pogge asks, at the beginning of his 2002 book, World Poverty and Human Rights, ―how can severe poverty of half of humankind continue despite enormous economic and technological progress and despite the enlightened moral norms and values of our heavily dominant Western civilization?‖24 Pogge continues to say: ―Our opportunity to abolish severe poverty worldwide starkly confronts us then with the question whether we have any responsibilities correlated to [the sufferings of] the global poor.‖25
The answer is yes. Citizens and politicians in the wealthy countries are responsible for the sufferings caused by global poverty. Pogge assigns the responsibilities through a series of analyses of causal relationships. First, he offers a historical 12

perspective:
―The present world is characterized not only by radical inequality…, but also by the fact that ‗the social starting positions of the worst-off and the better-off have emerged from a single historical process that was pervaded by massive grievous wrongs‘…Most of the existing international inequality in standards of living was built up in the colonial period when today‘s affluent countries ruled today‘s poor regions of the world: trading their people like cattle, destroying their political institutions and cultures and taking their natural resources.‖26
26 Pogge, 2005b, p.97
27 Ibid, p.97.
In other words, radical inequality today is not a neutral fact. It is clear evidence that people in the affluent countries have caused the suffering of billions of people in the world. Pogge continues to note that ―‗a morally deeply tarnished history must not be allowed to result in radical inequality.‘…And it is the rationale for saying that we are not entitled to the huge advantages we enjoy from birth over the global poor, given how these inequalities have been built up‖ – that is, through an actively unjust historical process.27
Secondly, he borrows Locke‘s notion that in a state of nature, each person would be entitled to a proportional share of the world‘s natural resources. Pogge thus evaluates the institutional order by examining whether the worst-off under it are at least as well off as people would be in a Lockean state of nature, with a proportional resource share of world‘s natural resources. Pogge then argues, 13

―catering from Lockeans, the second strand of my argument invokes the uncompensated exclusion of the worst-off from a proportional share of global resources: the present world is characterized not merely by radical inequality..., but also by the fact that ‗the better-off enjoy significant advantages in the use of a single natural resource base from whose benefits the worse-off are largely, and without compensation, excluded. The better-off—we—are harming the worse-off insofar as the radical inequality we uphold excludes the global poor from a proportional share of the world‘s natural resources and any equivalent substitute.‖28
28 Pogge, 2005b, p.99.
29 Ibid, p.101.
30 Ibid, p.100.
Clearly, the prevailing economic arrangements and the present economic distribution are unjust in virtue of the fact that the better-off deprive others of the proportional share of world‘s natural resources, in Locke‘s sense, and force them below any credible state-of-nature baseline.‖29
Thirdly, people in affluent countries are harming the global poor by imposing an unjust global order upon them. ―The present world is characterized not only by radical inequality…but also by the fact that ‗there is a shared institutional order that is shaped by the better-off and imposed on the worse-off.‘‖30 Pogge argues:
―the primary moral responsibility…must rest with those who shape and impose this order, with the governments and peoples of the most powerful and affluent countries. We lay down the fundamental rules governing internal and external sovereignty, national property rights in land and resources, global trade, 14

international financial transactions, and so on. And we enforce these rules through economic sanctions and occasional military interventions. These rules and their foreseeable effects are then our responsibility.‖31
31 Pogge, 2005a, p.31
32 Ibid, p.19.
33 Ibid, p.21.
Therefore, it is morally wrong to ascribe global poverty solely to national factors. Pogges takes two examples to illustrate how the existing global order influences national factors: the international borrowing privilege and the international resources privilege. According to Pogge, ―any group who controls a preponderance of the means of coercion within a country is internationally recognized as the legitimate government of this country‘s territory and people—regardless of how that group came to power, of how it exercises power and of the extent to which it may be supported or opposed by the population it rules.‖32 International recognition confers on the group the privileges to freely borrow in the country‘s name (international borrowing privilege) and to dispose of the country‘s natural resources (international resource privilege).
In such a country, any group taking power by whatever means, can maintain their power by buying the arms and soldiers they needs with the funds borrowed from abroad in the country‘s name and with the revenues from the export or sale the ownership of natural resources, no matter how strong the widespread popular is opposition.33 As a result, these privileges provide the incentives and facilitate the growth of destructive governments. Besides, any successor government that refuses to honor debts and contracts incurred by its corrupt, repressive predecessor will be severely punished by the banks, corporations and governments of other countries. In 15

sum, the causal role of global factors has illustrated the intertwined relationship between national and global factors in the global order. Therefore, people who uphold and maintain the existing unjust global order should never overlook their responsibility (or culpability), because they are harming the global poor if and insofar as they collaborate in imposing unjust social institutions upon them.
Pogge adds that this existing unjust global order ―is implicated in the reproduction of radical inequality in that there is a feasible institutional alternative under which so severe and extensive poverty would not persist.‖ In other words, the better-off are harming the worst–off not only because the better-off are upholding a shared, unjust global order, but also because they neglect the alternatives which can very possibly avoid reproducing inequality and relieve the human suffering through possible reforms. Pogge believes that because people in affluent countries,
―are implicated in shaping and enforcing the social institutions that produce these deprivations, and are moreover benefiting from the enormous inequality these unjust institutions reproduce, [they] have more stringent duties to seek to reform these social institutions and to do [their] fair share toward mitigating the harm they cause.‖34
34 Pogge, 2005b, p.95.
35 Pogge, 2005b, p.107.
In conclusion, ―by appeal to how our advantages arose historically, by appeal to Locke‘s resource-share criterion, and by appeal to the massive life-threatening poverty to which the existing global institutional order foreseeably and avoidably exposes the majority of humankind,‖35 Pogge basically envisions moral and political 16

obligations, specifically for agents who significantly collaborate in causing, imposing and upholding an unjust global order. ―Such agents must either stop contributing to this imposition or else compensate for this contribution by working toward appropriate institutional reforms and toward shielding the victims of injustice from the harms they help produce.‖36
36 Pogge, 2005a, p.27
37 Linklater, ‗Cosmopolitanism,‘ in Dobson Eckersley eds, Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p.3.
As Andrew Linklater suggests, cosmopolitan concerns ―are most likely to develop when actors believe that they are causally responsible for harming others and their physical environment.‖37 Pogge provides a persuasive analysis of the causal relationships between the conditions of the global poor and people in affluent countries, which could trigger people‘s action through the recognition of causal responsibilities.
4. Emotional motivation

Although, the ‗causal relationship analysis‘ is a powerful argument to motivate people‘s actions, it fails to address two crucial questions regarding human suffering: What responsibilities do people have to one another in cases where suffering is not caused by other people, as occurs in natural disasters or in cases of genetic disabilities? Second, are people who do not live in the relatively wealthy and developed countries irrelevant and without agency with respect to issues of global justice?
A more broadly shared and more inclusive motivation must be at the core of global 17

justice issues. I argue that the discourse on global and social justice and motivation to action will benefit from a consideration of the roles played by some possible emotional factors. The important role that emotions play to motivate political principles is also addressed by Martha Nussbaum. She asks:
―Why should [political] conception deal with emotions at all…? The answer is, plainly, that any political conception needs to concern itself with citizens‘ motivations, both in order to ensure that the conception is feasible in the first place—does not impose impossible strains on human psychology—and also in order to ensure that it has a decent chance of being stable over time. It therefore needs a ‗reasonable political psychology,‘ as Rawls says, one that is general enough to win broad approval and yet definite enough to assure us that our conception is not fatally flawed from the point of view of human motivation.‖38
38 Nussbaum, 2001, p.402
In sum, an adequate account of emotional motivations is necessary for political principles, because it not only can make them feasible but also sustainable.
Then, what kind of emotional motivation is adequate to guide principles for action with respect to human sufferings at the global level? Nussbaum suggests that compassion is. She argues:
―Prominent among the moral sentiments of people…will be compassion, which I conceive as including the judgment that the good of others is an important part of one‘s own scheme of goals and ends….Such benevolent sentiments are 18

ubiquitous in the lives of real people.‖39
39 Ibid, p.91.
40 Nussbaum, 1996, p.31.
41 Ibid, p.31.
42 Ibid, p.31.
In other words, Nussbaum believes that compassion is a particular way for human beings to relate the interests of others into our own concerns and it is one of the basic moral sentiments that all human beings share.
Nussbaum demonstrates how compassion motivates people‘s action through the examination of three cognitive elements of compassion. She defines compassion as ―a painful emotion directed at another person‘s misfortune of suffering.‖40 Basically, it requires and rests in three cognitive beliefs: first, the belief that the suffering is serious rather than trivial; second, the belief that the suffering was not caused primarily by the person‘s own culpable actions; and the third, the belief that the spectator‘s own possibilities are similar to those of the sufferers.41
Nussbaum begins with the belief of seriousness. She believes that compassion involves the recognition that the situation matters deeply for the life in question. In other words, internal to our compassionate response is the judgment that what is at issue is indeed serious. Borrowing from Aristotle, Nussbaum enumerates the occasions on which compassion could be felt: ―death, bodily assault or ill-treatment, old ages, illness, lack of food, lack of friends, separation from friends, physical weakness, disfigurement, immobility, reversals to expectations, or absence of good prospects.‖42 All of them are intuitively considered serious human sufferings. 19

Secondly, Nussbaum examines the belief that suffering is underserved. She says: ―Insofar as we do feel compassion, it is either because we believe the person to be without blame for her plight or because, though there is an element of fault, we believe that her suffering is out of proportion to the fault.‖43 By combining the first and the second elements, we can see that compassion requires the belief that there are serious bad things that are happening to people through no fault of their own, or beyond their fault. In feeling compassion for another, Nussbaum continues to argue, we ―accept a certain picture of the world, according to which the valuable things are not always safely under a person‘s control, but can be damaged by fortune.‖44
43 Nussbaum, 2001,p. 301.
44 Nussabum, 1996, p. 33.
45 Nussbaum,2001, p.316.
46 Ibid, p.315.
Thirdly, Nussbaum turns to the belief of similar possibilities. ―Compassion requires acknowledgement that one has possibilities and vulnerabilities similar to those of the sufferer.‖45 Nussbaum quotes Aristotle:
―Compassion concerns those misfortunes ‗which the person himself might expect to suffer, either himself or one of his loved ones‘…Thus,…it will be felt only by those with some experience and understanding of suffering; and one will not have compassion if one thinks that one is above suffering and has everything.‖46
That is to say, compassion requires the awareness of one‘s own same weakness and vulnerability as the sufferer. In other words, through compassionate experiences, the spectator recognizes the common vulnerability that every human being shares, because factors crucial to one‘s well-being are not always safely under his/her control. 20

Consequently, our common vulnerability helps to form a sense of community. Nussbaum believes that this sense of community is the fundamental motivation that will trigger people‘s political actions. ―The pain of another will be an object of my concern only if I acknowledge some sort of community between myself and the other, understanding what it might be for me to face such pain. Without the sense of commonness, both Aristotle and Rousseau claim, I will react with sublime indifference or mere intellectual curiosity, like an obtuse alien from another world; and I will not care what I do to augment or relive the suffering.‖47
47 Nussbaum, 1996, p.35.
48 Butler, 2004, p.29.
Judith Butler further emphasizes the common vulnerabilities of human lives in her 2004 book, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. Butler argues:
―In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt. This vulnerability, however, becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions, especially those in which violence is a way of life and the means to secure self-defense are limited…We must attend to it, even abide by it, as we begin to think about what politics might be implied by staying with the thought of corporeal vulnerability itself, a situation in which we can be vanquished or lose others.‖48
Quite distinct from Nussbaum, Butler draws her claim of common vulnerability from the experience of loss and the emotional response of grief in the context of global 21

violence. She says:
―The question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence is, Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life? Despite our difference in location and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a ‗we‘ for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous ‗we‘ of us all. And if we have lost, then it follows that we have had, that we have desired and loved, that we have struggled to find the conditions for our desire…. This means that each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies—as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.‖49
49 Butler, 2004, p.20.
50 Katharyne Mitchell, ―Geographies of identity: the intimate cosmopolitan, ‖ Progress in Human Geography, vol.10, 2007, p.1-15.
According to Butler, loss is something that we all share. It is thus possible to imagine a community on the basis of vulnerability and loss in order to challenge global violence. As Katharyne Mitchell comments on Butler‘s work: ―In the context of American aggression in Iraq and other regions around the world, it is necessary to counter political violence through recognizing the vulnerability of the Other in distant places. Through this recognition we begin to create long-distance communities of empathy bound together through loss and mourning and committed to an ethics of non-violence.‖50 22

Through the emotional mechanism of compassion: ―the spectator looks at a world in which people suffer hunger, disability, disease, slavery, through no fault of their own or beyond their fault…. she acknowledges that goods, such as food, health, citizenship, freedom, do all matter. Yet she acknowledges that it is uncertain whether she herself will remain among the safe and privileged ones to whom such goods are stably guaranteed. She acknowledges that the lot of the poor might be (or become) hers. This leads her to turn her thoughts outward, from her own current comfortable situation to the structure of society‘s allocation of goods and resources. For, given the uncertainty of life, she will be inclined to want a society in which the lot of the worst off—of the poor, of people defeated in war, of women, of servant—is as good as it can be.‖51
51 Nussbaum, 1996, p.36.
In conclusion, compassion motivates people, from a sense of community based on common vulnerability, to concern for the interests and needs of the distant sufferers and finally to the search for just solutions. People who are motivated by compassion will act because they identify with the sufferer, without inquiring whether they are the cause of the suffering. Therefore, compassion is a broader motivation toward global justice, because it is innate to every human being, and also because it attends to various kinds of human sufferings, including those that are caused by misfortune. 23

5. Conclusion

This essay has set out to demonstrate that there is a motivational problem at the heart of global justice issues. We have considered three possible motivations that could trigger people to act toward the alleviation of human sufferings: human rights discourse, causal responsibilities and compassion. While human rights discourse is undoubtedly able to invoke huge international attentions and resources, it is still subject to challenges from the cultural relativism and the suspicion of the imperialism of the West, when it claims universal validity. Conversely, Thomas Pogge argues persuasively for a causal relationship analysis, which assigns moral and political responsibility to people in the affluent countries to act to relieve suffering that they have caused.
However, the causal responsibilities analysis, despite its appeal, still leaves two questions unanswered: who is responsible for the alleviation of human sufferings that are not caused by other people, as in natural disasters and genetic disabilities? And secondly, are people who do not live in the relatively wealthy and developed countries irrelevant or passive in the struggle for global justice? Therefore, we turn to the emotional mechanism to find a more broadly shared and more inclusive motivation for action. Through the work of Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler, we have seen the possibility of building a sense of community based on common human vulnerabilities. When people are willing to acknowledge this sense of community and act upon it, compassion could complement, human rights discourse and causal responsibilities analysis, to offer a more powerful motivation to action, which is more attentive to a greater spectrum of human sufferings and which must be at the heart of 24

any platform for global justice.
I conclude with a quote from Thomas Buergenthal, who implores us to embrace a universalistic and empathetic commitment to human sufferings. Buergenthal says:
―The suffering of those whose stories we read about today or whose corpses we see on television-the face of that little boy whose mother was killed by a sniper as they walked hand in hand across a street somewhere in Bosnia-was our suffering not all that long ago. This is what we, the survivors, must feel in our bones, in our emotions, and in our hearts. Unless we can identify with today's victims and find ways to express our solidarity with them, to help them, our survival will have been nothing more than an act of random good luck of no lasting significance. Only by universalizing its inhumanity does the suffering of our people acquire a meaning for the future.‖52
52 Thomas Buergenthal, ―Remembering the Auschwitz Death March,‖ Human Rights Quarterly, vol.18, 1996, no.4, p874-876. 25

Reference:
Butler, Judith
2004 Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso Press.
Dobson, Andrew
2006 ―Think Cosmopolitanism,‖ Political Studies, no.54, p.165-184
Douzinas, Costas
2007 Human Rights and Empire, New York: Routledge-Cavendish,
Miller, David
2001 ―Distributing Responsibilities,‖ The Journal of Political Philosophy, vol.9, no.4, p453-471.
Nussbaum, Martha
1996 ―Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion.‖ Social Philosophy & Policy 13(1):27-58
2000. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
2001 Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University.
2007 Frontiers of Justice: Disability Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Pogge, Thomas
2002 World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, Oxford: Polity Press.
2005a ―Human Rights and Human Responsibilities,‖ Global Responsibilities: Who Must Deliver on Human Rights? eds. A Kuper, New York, NY : Routledge, p.1-35. 26
2005b ―A Cosmopolitan Perspective on the Global Economic Order,‖ The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, eds. G. Brock and H. Brightouse, Cambridge, UK: CUP, p.92-109.