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Should We Stop Thinking about Poverty in Terms of Helping the Poor?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Alan Patten
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Extract

It would be rather unusual for someone to argue publicly that the world's rich have no obligations at all with respect to the global poor. Many, however, claim that the obligations of the affluent countries are both fairly weak and minimal. This claim is typically arrived at via two premises: one is normative, the other factual. The normative premise asserts that while we are under a strict obligation not to harm others, the obligation to benefit people who we have not harmed is rather weak (and is, for instance, best left to private charitable efforts rather than government action or institutional reform). The factual premise is that the affluent are not, individually or collectively, harming the world's poor by causing their poverty (p. 12). Following Thomas Pogge, I will sometimes refer to this view simply as “libertarianism.” According to a second view, which I shall call the “need-based” view, we have a very strong and extensive set of duties to come to the assistance of the global poor: duties that are grounded in the neediness of the poor. In its most pure form, this view rejects altogether the ethical significance of the distinction between harming and failing to help. On a morally demanding version of the need-based view we have duties of assistance to anyone who is worse off than us, not merely those who are severely in need.

Type
Response To World Poverty and Human Rights
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 19 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2005

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References

1 Pogge, Thomas W., World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002Google Scholar). All in-text citation references are to this book.

2 “Libertarianism” here will be used as a designator for a particular view, based on the two premises, which has certain affinities with philosophical libertarianism—but is by no means equivalent to it.

3 Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 37Google Scholar.

4 In chapter 1 (esp. pp. 31–44), Pogge does sketch some of the principal elements of an account of global justice. However, it is not clear whether this account is meant to solve the baseline problem. Pogge argues against a recipient-focused view of justice and in favor of a view that takes into consideration not just how various prospective participants in a scheme of social institutions are likely to fare under that scheme, but also how the scheme relates to those expected outcomes—e.g., whether it is the cause of those outcomes or not (pp. 39–44). However plausible this might be as an account of justice, it produces a problem if that account is meant to serve as a baseline for judgments of causation and harm. In proposing this view of justice as his baseline, Pogge would find himself in a vicious circle in which justice is (partly) defined in terms of causation and causation is (partly) defined in terms of justice.

5 The phrase is from Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 265–69Google Scholar.

6 The plausibility of any such conjecture depends on whether one specifies the procedural baseline using a minimally fair set of international institutions or an ideally fair set of institutions. I think the sixteen million figure is implausible even if the procedural baseline is identified in terms of ideal fairness.

7 Pogge is scathing in his criticisms of Rawls's The Law of Peoples (e.g., see pp. 104–108). On a procedural interpretation of what Pogge is up to, however, it is hard to see a significant final difference between Pogge and Rawls, at least if one allows a minimally generous reading of the latter. Three possible areas of difference are the following: (1) Rawls argues that the duty of assistance applies only to those burdened societies that fall below a “cutoff point” of neediness, whereas Pogge is silent on this issue; (2) Rawls's duty of assistance applies directly to peoples, whereas Pogge's focus is on the justice of global economic institutions; (3) Rawls's duty is a duty of assistance, whereas Pogge's is a negative duty to stop harm. But (1) does not seem to be at issue in any obvious way in Pogge's book. As for (2), it overstates Rawls's inattention to global economic institutions. Rawls recognizes that his law of peoples would be incomplete without an account of fair trade and the design of international financial institutions (The Law of Peoples, pp. 42–43, 115), and nothing in his discussion rules out the possibility that the best way to fulfill the duty of assistance would be through a reconfiguration of global economic institutions. Finally, with respect to (3), I have been arguing in the text that on the procedural interpretation Pogge is faced with a choice between also accepting a duty of assistance or being on the hook for the normatively unpalatable implications of libertarianism.

8 I mean here to call into question the significance of Pogge's distinction between “interactional” and “institutional” accounts of rights and duties. Pogge writes, “The institutional understanding thus occupies an appealing middle ground: it goes beyond (minimalist interactional) libertarianism, which disconnects us from any deprivations we do not directly bring about, without falling into a (maximalist interactional) utilitarianism of rights, which holds each of us responsible for all deprivations whatever, regardless of the nature of our causal relation to them” (p. 66). Suppose, however, that for every situation in which a maximalist might claim that there is an interactional duty, it would also be possible to set up an institution (or extend an existing one) that alleviates the shortfall or provides the protection that triggers the alleged interactional duty. Then, the institutional view doesn't seem a “middle ground” so much as a way of relabeling the extensive set of duties defended by the maximalist.