Topics Ethics

Question Most people believe they have a duty to help those that are closest to them such as families and friends. Many people also would agree that they have a duty to help those who are not that close to them but share the same nationality. But, sadly, few people would agree that they have an obligation to help those who are deeply in need but far removed from them. Can philosophy help convince us of a duty to help people in very poor countries that live far-removed from us?

Accepted:
November 25, 2005

Comments

Philosophy can help convince some, as the efforts of writers like Peter Singer, Henry Shue, and Peter Unger have shown. But most people in the more affluent countries have not been moved by their arguments. It is therefore worth thinking about what else philosophy might do in response to the severe deprivations suffered by so many distant strangers.

Philosophers might, for example, question or challenge the common assumption that our morally most significant relation to the global poor is that of potential helpers.

In this vein, philosophers can explore the relevance of the fact that great affluence here and great poverty there have emerged from one historical process that was deeply pervaded by wrongs and injustices of the most horrific kinds (slavery, genocide, colonialism, etc.). Are we entitled to the highly privileged starting positions this process has bestowed on us in the face of the extremely miserable starting positions of so many others? If our wealth and opportunities are not, morally speaking, unproblematically ours, then devoting some of them toward poverty eradication may be required (not merely pursuant to a supposedly weak duty to help, but also) pursuant to a strong duty not to take advantage of injustice but rather to compensate its victims.

In the same vein, philosophers can explore the relevance of injustices in the global institutional order. These do not merely, like the historical process just mentioned, benefit us at the expense of the global poor, but they also are in large part the responsibility of our government (and its peers) for whose conduct we bear democratic responsibility. Thus, insofar as global rules governing trade, investment, intellectual property, etc., contribute to the immiseration of the global poor (and there is considerable evidence that this is so), we citizens of rich and powerful countries may be materially involved in this immiseration. If so, one can appeal to yet another duty in addition to the supposedly weak duty to help: Insofar as global institutional arrangements, designed and imposed in our name by the governments of the affluent countries, contribute to keeping billions of human beings in severe poverty and misery, we have a duty to compensate for this contribution. This duty becomes even stronger insofar as we can make such compensation out of the benefits we derive from global institutional injustice.

In short, philosophers can do a lot for this problem -- less in my view by giving further support and backing to a general duty to help, and more by showing how we are both contributing to and profiting from institutional arrangements that greatly burden the global poor and thereby perpetuate the global poverty problem.