Why Global Justice Matters

Moral Progress in a Divided World

Chris Armstrong

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509536214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía política

While many are born into prosperity, hundreds of millions of people lead lives of almost unimaginable poverty. Our world remains hugely unequal, with our place of birth continuing to exert a major influence on our opportunities. In this accessible book, leading political theorist Chris Armstrong engagingly examines the key moral and political questions raised by this stark global divide. Why, as a citizen of a relatively wealthy country, should you care if others have to make do with less? Do we have a moral duty to try to rectify this state of affairs? What does 'global justice' mean anyway - and why does it matter? Could we make our world a more just one even if we tried? Can you as an individual make a difference? This book powerfully demonstrates that global justice is something we should all be concerned about, and sketches a series of reforms that would make our divided world a fairer one. It will be essential introductory reading for students of global justice, activists and concerned citizens.

1
What is the Problem?

Living in Poverty

At the time of writing, eight hundred million people are living in what the World Bank calls severe poverty.¹ What this means in practice, according to the Bank’s definition, is that these millions upon millions of people each have less than $1.90 to live on every day. For many of us, that figure is already unimaginably low – the price of a cup of coffee, more or less. Still, you might be forgiven for thinking that it is perhaps enough for some people to get by. After all, in some countries one or two dollars might buy you a lot. That thought, however, needs to be quickly reconsidered. When the World Bank says that someone is living on the poverty line, it does not mean that he or she actually has $1.90 to live on. The World Bank is, understandably, interested in what people can buy with the money they have. When it says that eight hundred million people are living on $1.90 a day, what it actually means is that they have access to no more, and quite possibly much less, than what you could buy with $1.90 in the contemporary United States.

Just imagine for a moment what that might mean for a person’s daily existence. Someone attempting to live on $1.90 per day in the US would be living on a tiny fraction – less than a fiftieth – of the minimum wage in that country. Their entire existence, in all likelihood, would be devoted to fulfilling their most basic needs. They would go to sleep not knowing whether tomorrow was going to be a day in which they, or their children, would eat. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the income of the world’s severely poor is indeed spent on food, often of poor quality. That leaves, unfortunately, very little for anything else; and for the severely poor, this is a longterm reality. Access to education and healthcare is an ongoing challenge – never mind culture, or travel, or sports or other hobbies. Any unseen contingency – an illness which prevented you from working for a few days, say, or even discovering that your child needs a new pair of shoes – could throw your hand-to-mouth existence into jeopardy. As well as having very low incomes, the global poor have almost nothing in the way of wealth – and hence no safety net against emergencies, and no nest egg with which to nurture dreams for the future.²

Eight hundred million people live that kind of existence, day in and day out. As well as lacking access to adequate food, water and housing, their poverty may expose them to social stigma and political exclusion. The poor, all too often, are those who politicians can afford to ignore. Their poverty may expose them to other dangers too. They may be driven to take up any offer of work they can find, even if the work is dangerous, degrading, exploitative or illegal. Most of the world’s severely poor are women, and their poverty may place them at the mercy of men who wish to control or abuse them.³ Many of the poor will face political repression on the basis of their religion or ethnic group. Political exclusion and poverty can come together to form a vicious circle: their poverty, and the need to dedicate so much time to survival, may shut the poor out from opportunities to make their voices heard; their lack of voice in politics may then make it still less likely that the conditions of their life will change for the better. Whether as a result of repression or simply due to grinding poverty, many of the world’s poor place their lives in danger by attempting to flee to another country. As the bodies washed ashore on the beaches of the Mediterranean in recent years attest, their flight often exposes them to still further dangers. But even the lucky ones, who arrive safely on foreign shores, may face a precarious, marginalized future in their country of destination.⁴

Poverty, then, is not just a matter of a lack of income. The poor lack not only money – though that certainly matters – but also access to many of the ingredients of a decent life which citizens in the West are able to take for granted. The poor learn from a young age to live with patchy provision of education, especially at a secondary level. They become accustomed to insecure access to even basic healthcare, and frequently face poor quality air and unsanitary living conditions. Even water, that most basic necessity for any human life, exposes the severely poor to considerable dangers. Millions of people across the world suffer from waterborne diseases and from exposure to waterborne toxins such as arsenic. Millions of people – most often women – must spend hours each day locating and transporting fresh water for drinking, cooking and cleaning.⁵ When they find it, they often pay a heavy price. The cost of water in Ghana and Papua New Guinea is far higher than in the UK and the US, and can account for a significant proportion of a family’s income.⁶

Given that poverty is about more than simply dollar income, it has been argued – with some justification – that the World Bank’s $1.90 poverty line is too crude to be truly useful. Perhaps fixating on these income figures deflects our attention from the sheer variety of difficulties people face in leading secure and healthy lives. The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has argued that what matters is what people are able to do: the ‘capabilities’, as he puts it, that they are able to take for granted in their everyday lives. Core capabilities might include the ability to participate in politics, to learn about the world, and to enjoy good health. Such insights can form the basis of a more multi-faceted notion of human development which moves away from an exclusive focus on measures such as GDP or the purchasing power-adjusted dollar income of the poor.⁷ The so-called Multidimensional Poverty Index – which measures access to healthcare and education, as well as basics such as water, electricity and so on – is a leading example.⁸ A conception of poverty that moves away from an exclusive focus on income is undoubtedly superior. As a model of poverty gains in complexity, it will no longer deliver such clear messages about trends in global poverty; but as we will see in the final chapter of this book, a more complex model bears dividends when it comes to thinking about the best responses to global poverty. If poverty simply means a lack of money, then we might suppose that the obvious remedy is to provide more of it. If poverty also involves political marginalization and inequalities of status, the appropriate solutions must be more complex.

Still, whether we focus on income alone or on a wider range of measures, we confront the fact that the worst-off people in many societies are doing badly on pretty much every score. That is not to downplay the resilience and creativity involved in living in poverty, for the poor must and do become experts in coping with uncertainty, working long hours and seizing any opportunity that comes. But it is to emphasize the odds that the poor are striving against. For the very poor, difficulties which most of us would take in our stride – living, as we do, in societies where basic healthcare and education and some kind of social safety net can still usually be taken for granted – can make the difference between life and death. In many cases the outcome of the daily struggle with poverty is death. On average, fifty thousand people die every single day from poverty-related causes.⁹ Most of them are children in the first few years of life, who fall prey to illnesses which would be easily remedied if they lived in wealthy countries of the world.

To put that figure into some context, at the end of 2017 the world celebrated a year in which no-one at all had died in commercial jet crashes. This result was a remarkable testament to human skill, sound regulation and technical know-how. Aviation experts and policy-makers rightly patted themselves on the back for such a momentous achievement. But right now, during every day that passes, the equivalent of fifty jumbo jets full of people die from poverty-related causes – including conditions such as diarrhoea, measles and pneumonia – many of which are easily preventable. Whereas deaths from spectacular accidents garner extensive media attention, the same cannot be said for deaths from poverty.¹⁰ We have become inured to the existence of poverty, and struggle to see past the poverty statistics to the daily reality of individuals living in poverty.

So, just who are the world’s poor? One of the most striking facts is that most of them are female. Worldwide, women work longer hours than men, but earn less, own less and have poorer access to financial services. Older women, a...