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Pluralism about Global Poverty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2012

Jennifer C. Rubenstein
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Abstract

Theorists have identified a wide range of reasons why individual and collective actors have a moral responsibility to help alleviate global poverty. There is now widespread agreement that several of these reasons are valid. From the perspective of the poverty opponent, it might seem that the more reasons there are to alleviate poverty, the better. The difficulty is that different reasons for alleviating poverty point to different poverty-alleviating activities. This situation generates questions about both how actors should set priorities among different poverty-alleviating activities (‘actor-centred’ questions) and who should have primary responsibility for alleviating particular cases of poverty (‘case-centred’ questions). This article explains why actor-centred and case-centred questions are worth asking and sketches a promising way of responding to them.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 775 - 797
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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Footnotes

*

University of Virginia (email: [email protected]). The author thanks Christian Barry, Barbara Buckinx, Ryan Davis, Gerald Doppelt, Chad Flanders, Peter Furia, John Goldberg, Robert Goodin, George Klosko, Troy Kozma, Thomas Pogge, Mike Ravvin, Robert Talisse, Claire Timperley, Leif Wenar, and three anonymous reviewers, as well as audiences at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting, a meeting of the Princeton Society of Fellows in the liberal arts, and the Vanderbilt seminar on Responsibility and Global Justice for extremely helpful comments on previous versions of this article.

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4 According to Mason, ‘[t]he word “pluralism” generally refers to the view that there are many of the things in question (concepts, scientific world views, discourses, viewpoints etc.)’. See Elinor Mason, ‘Value Pluralism’, in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2008 Edition, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2008/entires/value-pluralism, (2006).

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7 If an actor has several reasons to alleviate poverty, but these reasons all point to the same (doable) activity, then actor-centred questions are of intellectual interest, but lack practical relevance.

8 I return to this issue in Section 4.

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51 Miller acknowledges this in passing.

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54 I thank Leif Wenar for pressing this point.

55 I address this issue extensively elsewhere.

56 However, as I argue in Between Samaritans and States: The Political Ethics of Humanitarian NGOs (forthcoming), donors should not treat NGOs as ‘do-gooding machines’.

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60 My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for help on this point.

61 My discussion here is indebted to Wenar, ‘Responsibility and Severe Poverty’.

62 The driving example is dis-analogous to global poverty in two ways: all drivers are sometimes front drivers and sometimes rear drivers, so assigning the responsibility to rear drivers distributes the burden among all drivers. In contrast, everyone is not sometimes very poor. In addition, while one can avoid paying for a traffic accident by avoiding hitting drivers in front of oneself, because global poverty already exists, there is no way for everyone to avoid responsibility for it by being careful (except, perhaps, if one only recognizes direct causal responsibility as a moral reason to help alleviate poverty).

63 Caney makes this point in terms of respect rather than fairness (see Caney, ‘Global Poverty and Human Rights’).