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More Than Charity: Cosmopolitan Alternatives to the “Singer Solution”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Andrew Kuper
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Extract

Nothing is more politically important to think about, and act upon, than global poverty relief. Numbers can mask the human faces of poverty, but they do bring out its scale: Today, any day, 30,000 children under the age of five will die from preventable illness and starvation. A further 163 million children who will survive this day are severely undernourished. Some 1.2 billion people will try to subsist on less than one dollar a day, while 2.4 billion will not have access to basic sanitation.

Type
Debate: Global Poverty Relief
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 107 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2002

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References

1 These figures are from the United Nations Human Development Report 2001 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 9–13Google Scholar.

2 World Bank, World Development Indicator 2000, table 6.8 (provides definitions and measures of the limited extent of development assistance), available at http://www.worldbank.org/data/wdi2000/pdfs/tab6_8.pdfGoogle Scholar.

3 Cited in Dennis Leyden, Thinking Critically in Economics, Web edition, at http://www.uncg.edu/eco/dpleyden/ctworkbook/hbookldiscussions(2e).htm.

4 Singer, Peter, “Famine, Affluence and Morality” (1972), reprinted in his Writings on an Ethical Life (New York: Ecco Press, 2000), p. 105–17Google Scholar.

5 Singer, Peter, “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” (1999)Google Scholar, reprinted in Writings on an Ethical

6 Life, pp. 118–24,Google Scholarat p. 123. Ibid. The amount is in 1999 dollars.

7 Ibid., p. 124Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., p. 122Google Scholar.

9 Singer, Peter, “Outsiders: Our Obligations to Those Beyond Our Borders,” (forthcoming [author's draft]), pp. 1–14Google Scholar, at p. 3.

10 Ibid., p. 7Google Scholar.

11 Ibid.; see also “The Good life,” in How Are We to live? (1993), reprinted in Writings on an Ethical life pp. 264–72, at p. 267Google Scholar.

12 Singer, , “Outsiders” p. 3Google Scholar.

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15 Sen, Amartya, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), pp. lll–45Google Scholar and 160–88; for case studies, see Sen, Amartya, Drèze, Jean, and Hussain, Athar, eds., Hunger and Riblic Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995Google Scholar).

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19 Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” p. 108.

20 O'Neill, Onora, “Agents of Justice,” Metaphilosophy 32 (January 2001), pp. 180-95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 John Dunn has repeatedly stressed the centrality of these questions to political understanding. See his The Cunning of Unreason (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

22 Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999Google Scholar).

23 Kuper, Andrew, “Rawlsian Global Justice: Beyond The Law of Peoples to a Cosmopolitan Law of Persons,” Political Theory 28 (October 2000), pp. 640–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Rawls, , The Law of Peoples, pp. 57–85Google Scholar.

25 Singer, “Outsiders, “p. 12Google Scholar (italics in original).

26 Kuper, “Global Justice,” pp. 645–53Google Scholar.

27 See some of the excellent essays by Thomas Pogge collected in World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2002Google Scholar).

28 Kuper, “Global Justice,” pp. 658–67Google Scholar.

29 For an empirical study of this kind of informed efficacy, from the perspective of the media as agents, see Kuper, Andrew and Kuper, Jocelyn, “Serving a New Democracy: Must the Media Speak Softly'?” International Journal of Public Opinion Reseach 13, no. 4 (2001), pp. 355–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 60–108Google Scholar and 258–84.

31 My thanks to Sanjay Reddy for insisting on this pointGoogle Scholar.

32 O'Neill, “Agents of Justice.” O'Neill has long argued, eloquently and persuasively that we need to know the corresponding and specific agent of obligation if we are to have a clear conception of the content of rights and the plausibility of claiming them.Google Scholar

33 Many of the problems of our world are problems not simply of distribution among states but of a state-centric system. A nesting of political structures that attempts to concentrate power around unitary, territorially differentiated loci of control is inescapably prone to conflict and misallocation. Such a system not only divorces the location of issues from the location of capability to resolve issues, but also encourages action to amplify a friend-foe dichotomy in politics. On these topics, see Kuper, , “Global Justice” and Held, David, McGrew, Anthony, Goldblatt, David, and Perraton, Jonathan, eds., Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1999Google Scholar).

34 See the discussion of this point in Quentin Skinner, Partha Dasgupta, Raymond Geuss, Andrew Kuper, Melissa Lane, Peter Laslett, and Onora O'Neill, “Political Philosophy: The View from Cambridge,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 1, Tenth Anniversary Issue (2002), pp. 1–19Google Scholar.

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37 Singer, “Outsiders,” p. 14Google Scholar.

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39 The need to take incentives seriously was one reason Rawls settled on “maximin” rather than “maximize” as a distributive principleGoogle Scholar.

40 The ILO Social Finance Unit itself insists on this point; see http://www.i10.org/public/english/employment/finance

41 Cited in Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 464Google Scholar.