The Ethics of Global Poverty

An introduction

Scott Wisor

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317574699
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophie
• Categoría: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

The Ethics of Global Poverty offers a thorough introduction to the ethical issues surrounding global poverty. It addresses important questions such as:

• 
  
  

• What is poverty and how is it measured?

• 
  
  

• What are the causes of poverty?

• 
  
  

• Do wealthy individuals have a moral duty to reduce global poverty?

• 
  
  

• Should aid go to those who are most in need, or to those who are easiest to help?

• 
  
  

• Is it morally wrong to buy from sweatshops?

• 
  
  

• Is it morally good to provide micro-finance?

Featuring case studies throughout, this textbook is essential reading for students studying global ethics or global poverty who want an understanding of the moral issues that arise from vast inequalities of wealth and power in a highly interconnected world.

1Introduction

Kadijja Nantonga worked with her husband at a coffee processing plant in central Uganda and was doing well by the standards of her community. Then, in 1996, her husband was killed along with ten others in a bus accident. Motor vehicle deaths are much more common in low-income countries, where bad infrastructure and weak traffic regulation lead to high mortality and morbidity on the road. Widowed, Kadijja kept working to support her family. Five years later, a disease destroyed the local coffee crop, causing Kadijja to lose her job when the factory closed. At the same time, her son fell ill, and she sold off many of her assets to pay for his health care. In the end, his disease was not adequately treated, and he died 2 years later. Kadijja, having lost her partner and son, now with no regular income and few assets, lived alone with her daughter (who was pulled from school), piecing together informal work (Krishna 2008, pp. 2–3). Even if Kadijja experiences some unexpected good luck, it will have been a life plagued by financial insecurity, hunger, poor health, and profound sadness and loss. It is also a life story that is sadly familiar to the situation faced by billions of people across the globe.

International statistics on individual living standards depict on a global scale what is personalized in the preceding story.¹ Just under half the world, or about 3 billion people, live on less than $2.50 per day, measured in US dollars in the year 2005. Roughly a billion people worldwide are malnourished. Over 2 billion people lack access to improved sanitation. And in most countries somewhere between one-third to two-thirds of women will be subject to physical or sexual violence over the course of their lives. The lives of people living in poverty, while not devoid of happiness, are disproportionately filled with pain, suffering, and human rights violations that are largely unknown to the world’s wealthiest individuals.

Consider Malawi, a small landlocked country in Southern Africa. Life expectancy at birth in Malawi is 55. This in contrast to the United States, where life expectancy is 78, or Sweden, where life expectancy is 82. Though drastic, these average life expectancy figures don’t reflect the variation in life chances within these countries. People living on the lowest incomes will tend to live much shorter lives than their higher income peers—in the United States the richest 1% of Americans have life expectancies 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent (Chetty et al. 2016). Much of the global disparity in life expectancy is attributable to very early death. Many Malawians don’t make it through childhood—68 out of 1,000 children will not survive past their fifth birthday. This number is 24 in Vietnam and 7 in the United States. For those that do live long lives in Malawi, they mostly get by with less income, opportunity, and security than do people in other countries.²

It is not easy for a person living in a relatively prosperous country to grasp what life is like for people living in such drastically different conditions. Even if a person living in a high-income country voluntarily forgoes food for a short period, it is difficult to know what it would be like to not be able to feed your children when they go hungry, or to know that the water they are drinking could give them a deadly disease. It is difficult to understand what life is like when one must defecate on a piece of cardboard and throw it on her own roof in a crowded slum, because there is no space, security, or income available for improved sanitation. It is difficult to imagine the pain in pulling your daughter from school to work at home, because the value of her domestic labor is perceived as being more valuable than her education. Even for people who have been fortunate enough to travel abroad, and perhaps have even lived in poor communities or worked on a project with people living in material or social deprivation, there are limits to understanding how different these lives are from those in affluent societies.

The existence of widespread poverty, in a world of historically unprecedented material abundance, raises important ethical questions. This book offers an introduction to the ethics of global poverty for students and citizens concerned with one of the world’s most pressing moral problems. It starts from two assumptions. First, extreme global poverty of the kind briefly described above is morally problematic and a proper subject of moral reflection. It is not merely a matter of misfortune or bad cosmic luck that some people are so badly off while others are not. Rather, it is a moral and political problem that is caused by and can be solved by moral agents, thereby raising the question of whether individuals and institutions have duties to combat global poverty. Second, acting ethically with regard to global poverty requires understanding the nature of the problem, its causes, and its possible remedies. This understanding must be interdisciplinary—drawing on insights from anthropology, economics, law, sociology, psychology, political science, and other disciplines. Furthermore, a proper understanding of global poverty must learn from practice—gleaning insights from governments, NGOs, activist organizations, civil society, and most importantly from the perspectives and views of the men and women who live with and struggle against deprivation on a daily basis. Only with this understanding in place can one answer many of the moral questions that arise from the persistence of global poverty.

An immediate question comes to mind when considering the ethics of global poverty. Why should anyone study this topic in the first place? If huge numbers of people are suffering so greatly, why waste time figuring out what is right and wrong? Let’s just get on with doing something about this horrendous problem!

This position is understandable, but it is mistaken. There are good reasons to seriously study the ethics of global poverty. First, like other human activities, the more serious a problem is, the more important it becomes to understand what morality requires of us. Consider the parallel of the ethics of war. One might think the point of warfare is not to be ethical but to win, given that defeat can be so devastating for the vanquished. Therefore, ethics has no place in warfare. But of course this is not true—it is precisely because so much that is morally valuable is at stake in deciding to go to war and deciding how it should be fought that we must carefully study just war theory. So too for the ethics of global poverty. It is because so much moral harm is committed against poor people, including by people who claim to be acting in the name of poverty alleviation, that we must make the ethics of global poverty central to efforts to eradicate global poverty.

Before examining ethical questions in depth, we will spend the first part of the book getting clear on what global poverty is, what it is caused by, and how we can learn about it. Chapter 2 investigates the nature of global poverty. How should we think about what poverty is, and how should it be measured? Do people born into poverty stay in poverty, or do the people who live in poverty change over time? What is life like for people who live below the poverty line?

Chapter 3 investigates the causes of global poverty. There are a number of theories that both academics and public commentators claim explain the persistence of global poverty. Some are not very good: that people are poor because of their behavior, or because of their culture, or because of the bad decisions they make. Others have some truth to them, but don’t explain the bulk of the story: for example, that poverty is a result of bad geography, which gives people diseases and offers them few productive opportunities. The best explanation is that some people are poor because they live under extractive and exploitative institutional arrangements, which prevent them from making further progress in their lives.

Chapter 4 explores the epistemology of global poverty. How do people study poverty and poverty alleviation? Is there a science to understanding poverty eradication? Can learning more about poverty translate into more effective anti-poverty programs?

With this introductory understanding of global poverty in hand, Part II turns squarely to questions of our ethical duties. Given that poverty exists, what are people morally required to do about it? This part focuses exclusively on the duties of well-off individuals. While there are interesting questions about what poor people owe to themselves and other similarly situated individuals, and what they may do in the name of combatting their deprivation, this will not be our focus here.³

Chapter 5 focuses on one approach to understanding the duties of wealthy individuals to people who are deprived—what we will call the duty of humanity. On this view, the mere fact that one group lives comfortable lives with excess income to spare while another group suffers a great deal due to material shortfalls is thought to ground duties of assistance. Possessing the capacity to help and the knowledge of suffering, the wealthy are required to assist the poor.

Chapter 6 considers an alternative account of the duties of wealthy individuals to poor people abroad—the duty of justice. It is not merely by virtue of a common humanity that anti-poverty assistance is owed. Rather, it is because individuals in wealthy countries have been (historically and in the present day) complicit in harming individuals in poor countries and they are therefore bound by duties of justice to prevent and rectify these harms.

Chapter 7 considers associative duties—duties that arise out of the relationships we have. In the case of global poverty, such duties might derive from a shared history or culture, an enduring relationship of mutual aid and support, a common colonial history, or enduring diplomatic and commercial relations.

Finally, in Chapter 8, we consider arguments against moral duties to alleviate poverty. Why might someone deny that morality requires wealthy individuals to work to reduce global poverty? Though I do not have much sympathy for this approach, we will give a fair hearing to both philosophical and practical arguments in favor of this view.

Part III explores one way duties to eradicate global poverty might be discharged—through the provision of foreign aid. Chapter 9 considers arguments in favor of and against foreign aid, as provided through both private and public channels. It also considers how recent innovations in the provision of foreign aid aim to accelerate global poverty reduction.

Chapter 10 considers the difficult question of aid allocation. Given that the number of people in need far exceeds the resources that have been made available to combat poverty, how should limited funds be allocated? Should aid go to those who are most in need, or to those who are easiest to help? Is it wrong to spend money on HIV treatments, which are comparatively expensive, when malaria and other diseases are much easier to treat?

Part IV moves beyond the aid debate to look at a series of proposed global institutional reforms that might accelerate progress in poverty reduction. Chapter 11 considers immigration policy, and the impressive ability of international migration to reduce global poverty. It also explores reasons offered against a more permissive international migration regime.

Chapter 12 considers arguments for and against humanitarian intervention, and the role external militaries might play in reducing the conflicts that cause many states to remain mired in poverty.

Chapter 13 examines the role that international trade plays in promoting poverty reduction, and considers how certain provisions of international trade agreements impede the ability of countries to make development progress.

Part V concludes the book, focusing on some of the specific practical moral problems that arise in anti-poverty programs. Chapter 14 examines the problem of speaking for others, especially with regard to activist groups who are involved in anti-poverty campaigning. It explores western activist campaigns, the visual depiction of poor people, and other issues arising from efforts to give a platform to those whose voice is not typically heard.

Chapter 15 examines consumerism, and morally evaluates ethically conscious consumer efforts, such as the RED campaign and Fairtrade, to reduce global poverty. It also discusses the question of whether consumers are required to consider the impact of their other consumptive activities on global poverty.

Chapter 16 examines the micro-finance industry. It considers whether some commercial transactions that offer small loans to poor people are unethical, and whether it is morally permissible to profit from poverty. It examines what moral constraints, if any, should be placed on the provision of micro-finance.

For students who are using this as a textbook in a formal educational setting, the book is structured so that it can be used over the course of a single term, but it is equally accessible for readers pursuing the topic outside the classroom. Covering one to two chapters per week, the book can be completed in 2 or 3 months’ time. Of course, readers are welcome to read more quickly than that! Most of the book’s chapters can be read independently of the book’s other material and do not necessarily need to be read in order.

While this textbook aims to be comprehensive in its coverage, it is not exhaustive. The ambitious reader will gain a great deal by supplementing the book with a consistent engagement with the latest news, debates, and scholarship on global poverty. While there is a lot of nonsense written about global poverty, there is more good information and analysis available today than at any ...