John Pearson
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Ethics and Public Policy
2005-2006
Famine, Justice and Morality: Are Justice or Morality Relevant When Trying To
Prevent Famine?
February 2006
1
Introduction
Peter Singer wrote his provocative essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality” in response
to the Bangladeshi famine of the 1970’s. At the time, it seemed that institutions capable
of dealing easily with the situation existed; all that was lacking was the funding. The fact
that such money could easily be spared by inhabitants of wealthy nations but was not
donated amounted to a serious moral failure for Singer. Bernard Williams’s critique of
utilitarian moral theory is relevant to what Singer says. Singer’s proposals about how
much we are obliged to donate are based on the claim that our moral obligations override
all our other interests. Williams argues that, although such interests are not moral, and
can be obstacles to important moral goals, they still cannot be ignored. In this paper, I
want to pursue two lines of discussion in the controversy between Singer and Williams.
The first is that our obligations can extend beyond a narrow immediate sphere if proper
institutions for the expression of those obligations exist. These institutions allow us to
express our obligations, but they also place limits on them, so that they don’t come to
override all our other concerns. The second line of discussion relates to a broader
preventative programme of famine relief that has emerged in recent years. This argues
that global justice is the best way to help the global poor. I will argue that, with some
modification, this perspective can be fitted into Williams’s account. I will argue that we
can separate justice and morality in a useful way. Finally, I will conclude by suggesting
that preventing global poverty through justice places limits on our global obligations to
provide emergency relief to famine victims.
i) Singer on famine relief.
Singer’s thesis is intended to counter a moral assumption that the majority of people in
Western societies appear to make when deciding to give money to help with famine
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relief: most people assume that this is a morally non-obligatory act of generosity. They
see their donation as a charitable act that is a good thing to do, but they do not feel that
they ought to be morally condemned if they fail to make a donation. Singer responds to
this view of famine relief with the following general moral argument: “if it is in our
power to prevent something bad happening, without thereby sacrificing something of
comparable moral significance, we ought, morally to do it” (FAM, p. 586). The example
Singer uses to illustrate is that of a drowning child in a shallow pond: if we come across a
child in this situation, we can easily intervene to help. The only risk is that we might get
our clothes muddy. Anyone who sees that as a relevant obstacle is a morally despicable
individual. Singer affirms the three premises of this argument in relation to famine relief.
1) It is in our power to help. Money is needed to help people in danger of starving to
death, and people in the West have the necessary financial resources. 2) We wouldn’t
sacrifice anything worthwhile by helping. The resources people in the West own are not
used to promote any goods of comparable moral value to saving lives: as Singer puts it,
“such matters as being fashionably dressed are not really of moral significance”. 3) We
ought (we are morally obliged) to help. Given premise one and two, our failure to provide
the necessary funding for famine relief is a serious moral failure: it is not just a refusal to
do something good but morally optional – it is a failure to do what is morally obligatory,
and is thus open to moral condemnation.
Singer goes on to develop an argument about the amount this moral scheme obliges us to
give away. He does this by proposing two versions of the second premise of his original
argument: the first, strong version of this premise is that we ought to give away as much
as we can “without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance”. The second,
weaker version is we ought to give away as much as we can “without sacrificing anything
of moral significance”. The first premise obliges us to reduce ourselves to the level of
“marginal utility”; “that is, the level at which, by giving more, I would cause as much
suffering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by my gift. This would mean, of
course, that one would reduce oneself to very near the material circumstances of a
Bengali refugee” (FAM, p. 592). Singer claims that the second, weaker premise still
obliges us to give away a lot more than we currently do, since many of the things we
spend our money on are of no moral significance. Singer then goes on to assert that there
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is no reason why the second premise rather than the first one should be affirmed. He does
not explain why there is no reason, but his point could be explained thus: the moral
significance of any of the goods we can attain in the West is diminished if a more morally
serious problem such as famine is occurring somewhere in the world. This suggests that
we ought to maximise the moral goodness of our actions: if we do not try to address the
most serious moral situations in the world, then we would be failing to fulfil this principle
of moral maximisation. We would be doing less than is morally required if we pursued
goods of less moral significance than that of addressing the most serious moral problem,
that of famine1.
Regardless of this discussion, though, this is the upshot of Singer’s argument: we ought
(we have a strong moral obligation) to give away wealth to a degree that reduces us to a
level of marginal utility. That is, the morally required level of donation is set at the point
where we would inflict as much suffering on ourselves as on the people we want to help
if we gave away more.
ii) Williams’s critique of utilitarianism.
Bernard Williams’s critique of utilitarianism is relevant to Singer’s argument. Williams
develops a specific ethical language out of his general criticisms of utilitarian moral
theory. Williams argues that we rank the things we value in life using a general category
of “importance”. Some things are important to us, others less so. Moreover, the
judgement of importance is often relative to individuals. Some people might consider
such things as stamp-collecting, watching football matches, or drinking beer to be
important; it is possible to do this in full awareness that these things are not really
important in any global or universal sense. However, they do feature as considerations in
what we choose to do. Williams argues that there is nothing intrinsic to these things that
1
Others who agree with Singer’s basic position have attempted to defend something
resembling the weaker demand. Christopher Heath Wellman, for example, proposes that
we give $100 of our income to famine relief. The problem with this argument is that such
apparently arbitrary figures fall well short of the moral obligation that Singer’s position
prescribes. Viewed from within Singer’s argument, giving less than the level set by the
strong demand amounts to a moral failure.
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makes them more or less important than other considerations – such as the decision to
give money to help with famine relief. These things are important from the perspective of
the particular individuals who value them. Unlike Singer, Williams asserts that this
importance to individuals is a relevant ethical factor; it makes a difference to peoples’
decisions about what to do. Put this way, Williams’s thesis might sound both callous and
relativistic, but there is an important point behind what he says. The point is this: the
utilitarian idea that there is some sort of general category of moral obligation that would
override all our other concerns and interests is deeply mistaken. Williams argues that our
obligations are structured by their relationship to various other concerns or interests.
Without such a structure to put them in perspective, our sense of obligation expands
alarmingly. As Williams puts it,
if we have accepted general and indeterminate obligations to further various
moral objectives…they [the objectives] will be waiting to provide work for idle
hands, and the thought can gain a footing (I am not saying that it has to) that I
could be better employed in doing something I am under no obligation to do, and
if I could be, then I ought to be: I am under an obligation not to waste time doing
things I am under no obligation to do…If obligation is allowed to structure ethical
thought, there are several ways in which it can come to dominate life altogether
(ELP, p. 182)2.
It is precisely this sort of general moral obligation – the obligation “to prevent bad things
from happening if it is in our power to do so” – that structures the demand that Singer
makes in his response to famines. The dominating tendency of this sort of moral demand
becomes quite evident when we look again at what Singer actually proposes for us to do.
According to the figures Singer gives in relation to the Bangladeshi famine that prompted
his article, £300,000,000 was needed to provide relief. There was enough wealth to
provide this money without everyone in the West reducing themselves to a level of
marginal utility. However, the suspicion that not everyone else is giving the required
amount seems to create a personal obligation on each individual to give up to the level of
2
There are several ways to interpret this point about domination. The most obvious one is
that Singer’s approach calls for us to work unremittingly to alleviate famine until we drop
into an early grave from sheer exhaustion. A more subtle, and perhaps more realistic,
psychological interpretation is that these obligations hang over us and create an
indeterminate sense of guilt that poisons all our other activities and interests, and makes
them seem frivolous or worthless.
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marginal utility. Giving less would constitute a moral failure because we would not be
doing everything within our power to help, and we would be failing to sacrifice things of
lesser moral worth3. Furthermore, while our obligation to give in a particular emergency
might be comparatively small, there is always the anxiety that there are other
emergencies that call for help and that we would again be failing if we did not provide as
much money as possible in order to cover these cases as well. It is not clear in Singer’s
account whether the moral obligation to give only lasts as long as the particular
emergency case, or whether we have a more long term obligation. He does argue, though,
that “we would have to give away enough to ensure that the consumer society, dependent
as it is on people spending on trivia rather than giving to famine relief, would slow down
and perhaps disappear entirely. There are several reasons why this would be desirable in
itself” (FAM, p. 592). This suggests that we do have a moral obligation that goes well
beyond the individual case, and extends as far as restructuring both our society and our
moral outlook so that we could provide help in all such cases. As long as our strong
moral obligation to prevent bad things happening overrides other concerns and issues, we
will always feel a sense of anxiety that we are not quite doing enough to help.
iii) Ethics or Morality? Obligations without morality.
Williams objects to the claim that there are such things as moral obligations, in the sense
that there are things that are so important that they override all our other concerns. He
does not object to the idea that there are some things that we do find particularly
important, and that these things may generate particular obligations. However, these
particular obligations do not have the overriding force of moral obligations because they
are not informed by other, general moral obligations with overriding force of their own.
3
Singer attempts to respond to one line of criticism that says that if everyone gave up to
the marginal utility level, we would create a surplus and the sacrifice of some people
would have been unnecessary. He responds by claiming that the level of sacrifice other
people have already made is relevant to our decision about how much to give: if some
start by giving generously, others will not have to give so much. However, this seems to
give people a strong incentive to give only small amount of money early on, since they
can claim to have fulfilled their duty while actually shifting the burden onto those who
give later.
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Instead, they are informed by ethical considerations that are particularly important to us
and thus have a strong influence over our deliberations about what to do, but which do
not exert any more powerful moral force than that. A particular ethical system will give
deliberative priority to considerations that make certain valued or desirable types of
behaviour into reliable outcomes of the process of deliberating about what to do.
Williams suggests two ways in which these non-moral obligations might be expressed.
First: “One type of obligations is picked out by the basic and standing importance of the
interests they serve. These are all negative in force, concerning what we should not do”
(ELP, p. 185). There are certain sorts of behaviour that we want to promote all the time,
because they serve standing interests. However, actions like donating to famine relief are
excluded from this category because it does not contain any positive obligations – we are
told not to do certain things, not required to do things. Second: “Another, and now
positive, sort involves the obligations of immediacy. Here, a high deliberative priority is
imposed by an emergency…A general ethical recognition of peoples’ vital interests is
focused into a deliberative priority by immediacy, and it is immediacy to me that
generates my obligation, one I cannot ignore without blame” (ELP, p. 186). This way of
characterising positive obligations has two effects. Firstly, it relieves us of the burden of
donating as much money as we can, all the time, because it is only in particular cases that
our priorities would be focused in the way Williams claims: “the underlying disposition
is a general concern, which is not always expressed in deliberative priority, and what
produces an obligation from it is, precisely, the emergency” (ELP, p. 186). The second
thing it seems to do is to relieve us of the obligation of extreme sacrifices in cases where
the emergency is not immediate to our concerns. Immediacy is not clearly defined, but it
seems to include things like close physical proximity, seriousness, relevance to what we
consider important and so on.
The first of these effects seems to break the connection between moral obligations and
our more general ethical concerns. Our general ethical concerns only produce obligations
to act in immediate cases; these concerns do not structure our thoughts in such a way that
they always get first priority when we deliberate about what to do.
The second effect is more problematic. Even if Singer’s connection between the general
obligation of preventing bad things and the particular obligation to help in cases of
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famine is broken, there is still a form of obligation in cases of emergency that Singer
might be able to exploit. Williams argues that emergencies focus our deliberative
priorities: when we see a child drowning in a pond, we change our focus and direct our
energy to helping save the child. This is limited by the concerns of immediacy. As I
pointed out above, this term is not very clearly defined in Williams’s discussion. As a
result, it does seem possible to exploit it in order to transform the demand for help in
cases of famine into an obligation – although perhaps not an obligation in the full moral
sense originally demanded by Singer. This would work by expressing the plight of
apparently distant famine victims in the language of immediacy. In fact, Singer seems to
come close to taking this option in his discussion. He points out that “From the moral
point of view, the development of the world into a ‘global village’ has made an
important, though still unrecognised, difference to our moral situation. Expert observers
and supervisors…can direct aid to a refugee in Bengal almost as effectively as we could
get it to someone on our own block” (FAM, p. 587). The increasing awareness of
globalisation in the decades since Singer wrote reinforces this “global village” argument:
ethically sensitive people feel a greater awareness that their actions have effects in distant
places, the media can bring the plight of famine victims to our attention very quickly, and
international relief organisations have gained more experience and skill in delivering
aid.4. If people begin to feel closer and more responsible for each other on a global scale,
will this secure a relevant sense of immediacy? Will globalisation create a sense of
obligation to help people faced by famines and other emergencies? Williams seems to
hold that it will not. He points out,
Some moralists say that if we regard immediacy or physical nearness as relevant,
we must be failing in rationality or imagination; we are irrational if we do not
recognise that those starving elsewhere have as big a claim on us as those starving
here. These moralists are wrong, at least in trying to base their challenge simply
on the structure of obligations (ELP, p. 186).
Williams claims that immediacy creates a certain kind of obligation. However, it also
excludes others. It is inappropriate to try and secure a type of behaviour that we want to
promote simply by expanding the scope of what counts as immediate: the scope of this
4
Hugh Lafollette gives a useful summary of these kinds of argument in his chapter
“World Hunger”.
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concept is inherently limited. Singer seems to be trying to achieve this kind of
inappropriate expansion when he talks about the global village. He tries to create a kind
of obligation that depends on an immediacy that is just not present at that level. The
problem with this discussion is that seems to threaten to degenerate into an intractable
controversy. If Singer and others like him genuinely do feel the plight of famine victims
in a way that somehow fits into the category of immediacy, then perhaps they do come
under the force of obligation. If Williams and others like him do not feel that plight as an
immediate emergency, perhaps they do not. Williams gives us good reason to ask
whether we should expand the scope of immediacy. However, the question as to whether
we can expand its scope – and thus the obligations that are attached to it - seems to
remain open.
iv) Immediacy and Obligation
I want to respond to this problem by arguing that the account of famine relief in terms of
the “drowning child” scenario is inappropriate. The first problem is with Williams’s
conception of immediacy. Williams seems to suggest that this kind of scenario does
create a very strong obligation: “A general ethical recognition of people’s vital interests
is focused into a deliberative priority by immediacy, and it is immediacy to me that
generates my obligation, one I cannot ignore without blame” (ELP, p. 186). The
drowning child scenario does create a strong obligation of this type, even, it would seem,
in Williams’s less demanding ethical scheme. Williams thus asserts that there is a circle
of immediate obligations to protect certain vital interests. The number of vital interests
and the size of the circle are small. Furthermore, our ability to transfer our interests
beyond the small immediate circle is limited: one of Williams’s major attacks on modern
moral philosophy is his objection to the idea of some sort of World Agent able to judge
all moral cases in an impartial way (see ELP, p. 91. Here Williams points out that a cruel
person can show just as much insight into other people’s suffering as a sympathetic
person). The problem with immediacy is that it does not admit of degrees: things are
either immediate to our concerns or they are not. I think this view of the famine situation
is a mistake: there are situations where we recognise that people are being denied vital
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interests, and some of these can be quite remote from our own situation. We can
recognise the existence of some sort of obligation without feeling it as the intense,
pressing need to intervene that we feel in the “child in the pond” scenario. In order to
emphasise this, we need to look more closely at Williams’s conception of immediacy. He
does not go into much detail regarding this term, but I think it needs closer examination.
Immediacy can relate to a number of different factors. These might include the following:
1) Urgency: How quickly do we need to act in order to help?
2) Proximity: Is the situation physically close to us?
3) Seriousness: Are vital interests at stake? Is this a life-or-death situation?
4) Risk: Do we have to take account of danger to ourselves before deciding to act?
These - and perhaps other - factors combine to make up the conception of immediacy.
Presumably, Williams would insist that all of them have to be present in order to generate
the kind of strong positive obligation he discusses. However, breaking the concept down
in this way suggests that Williams’s strict delimitation of the scope of immediacy is not
quite accurate. The child in the pond scenario is a case where the four factors I mentioned
are fulfilled. However, there may be cases where some but not all of the factors are
fulfilled: famines are an example because, although they are not proximate, they are
urgent and serious. The presence of a few important factors may cause us to give certain
situations a higher priority in our deliberations than normal; when debating whether to
give money to famine relief or a local homeless charity, the seriousness and urgency of
the famine could override the proximity of the homeless charity. There is another
important point here, though; the fact that some of the relevant factors are absent means
that we don’t feel the same strong obligation we would in the “child in the pond”
scenario. The point here is that there seems to be a conception of immediacy that lies
between Singer’s attempt to make all cases equivalent to the “child in the pond scenario”
and Williams’s attempt to keep the number of such cases to a bare minimum.
The next point is that we don’t express our obligation to help in these cases of “weak”
immediacy in the same way as we do in the full blown immediate emergency exemplified
by the child in the pond scenario. I have suggested that the absence of some of the
relevant factors weakens the obligation somewhat. More important, though, is our ability
to introduce intermediate institutions that allow us to respond to emergency situations in
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an appropriate way. The “child in the pond scenario” is a poor choice to illustrate the
problem of famine relief because it is immediate in a very strong sense. A more relevant
illustration might be that of witnessing a burning house. In this case, we have an
obligation to help, but it is expressed through an intermediate institution; we are obliged
to call the fire brigade. Interestingly, the existence of these institutions can change the
character of the immediate situation: “Risk” might mitigate our immediate obligation to
help (the danger to our own lives overrides the other factors), but the existence of an
institution like the fire brigade reinstates the obligation because we can help without
putting ourselves in danger. These institutions distribute the risks and burdens of helping
in emergency situations; the financial costs of helping are spread across society, while the
potential danger is restricted to a few individuals. Furthermore, because an institution like
the fire brigade focuses skills and training, it allows individuals to help in a more
meaningful way when emergencies do occur; the ability of a single person or even a large
group of inexperienced people to put out a house fire is questionable, whereas a small
number of trained professionals is much better equipped to do the job.
Singer’s use of the child in the pond scenario distorts our ethical understanding. In that
case, we are one individual capable of helping another individual in a clearly limited
context. The scale of the famine relief scenario changes the picture radically; we become
one individual charged with helping a potentially huge number of people, and the limits
of our obligation are far from clear. It may be that the desperate nature of this sort of case
leads Singer to his extreme conclusion about what to do: the absence of any meaningful
institutions that could help in the Bangladeshi famine seems to have led Singer to express
his proposal using a misleading example. The idea of pouring money or food directly into
famine-stricken areas reflects the idea of an immediate obligation to help, but it has
become increasingly clear that these direct interventions are at best misguided and at
worst counterproductive5.
5
LaFollette quotes evidence that supports this point; “During the 1974 famine in
Bangladesh, the amount of food per capita was the third highest during a ten-year period
(Dreze and Sen, 1989: 28). This finding was duplicated within the regions of the country
worst hit by the famine. ‘One of the famine districts (Dinajpur) had the highest
availability of food in the entire country, and indeed, all four of the districts were among
the top five in terms of food availability per head’” (WH, p. 241).
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In fact, Singer does modify his position in the direction of a more intermediate approach
to famine relief; in a later (1996) appendix to his original paper, he emphasises the
importance of population control to famine relief. There are two problems with this
modification, though. Firstly, the introduction of indirect means of dealing with famine
situations weakens the force of the moral obligation that Singer argues for. Singer wants
to claim that famines are morally equivalent to the child in the pond scenario, but this
similarity seems to include the demand that we offer immediate help. If we can help best
in an indirect way, this opens up a large gap between the types of obligation the two
situations generate; I would suggest that the “weak” conception of immediacy that I
outlined above is better able to handle this distinction.
Secondly, there is a significant problem with the type of intermediary institutions that
would emerge if we followed Singer’s account of our obligations to famine victims. This
can be illustrated as follows: According to Singer, we are concerned above all with
preventing bad things from happening. This moral obligation makes all other concerns
trivial. It is possible to imagine two possible institutions that deal with famine relief. The
first is very inefficient, expensive and labour intensive. It requires people in the west to
work very hard to maintain it. It is, though, able to carry out its basic task of preventing
famine. The second institution is efficient and cheap to run. It carries out its task, but it
works well enough that people can still devote much of their time to pursuing other
things they find important. Intuitively, we would expect most people to prefer the latter
institution. The problem for Singer is that his account leaves us with no resources to
explain the preference. Given that our concern with our moral obligation overrides all our
other concerns, rendering them trivial, we would have no reason to prefer the second
institution, since it doesn’t seem to secure anything worthwhile beyond providing famine
relief. Indeed, Singer’s claim that our most important concern is our moral obligations
suggests that we would actually prefer the inefficient institution, since it allows us to fill
up our lives pursuing our moral obligations and leaves less room to be filled with
trivialities. Williams’s account gives us a better explanation of why we prefer the second
institution, because he allows room for concerns and interests beyond the obligation to
help people in distress: the second form of institution is preferable because it secures
more space for us to pursue other things that we find important.
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This last point raises a further objection to Singer: if we are only concerned with
preventing the “bad thing” that famines cause – namely, the immediate threat to vital
interests – we may lose sight of the origins and causes of the situations that bring those
situations about. Singer states, “I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from
lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad” (FAM, p. 586). Suffering and death are
the moral bottom line of his theory. All things above this line seem to be trivial on
Singer’s account. However, this has several disturbing consequences. Firstly, our only
obligation is to bring people above this bottom line. We can fulfil our moral obligations if
we bring people above this bottom line, even if we do so without making any effort to
look at the deeper structural causes of the situation. Furthermore, we don’t have any
moral right to claim back the things we lost in making the sacrifices necessary to save
people; those things were trivialities anyway. Again, if our moral duties are set at the
level of alleviating the immediate situation, we could fulfil our obligations by lurching
from one emergency to another, throwing food into the hands of the starving, without
feeling any curiosity about why they are starving in the first place, and without
wondering what happened to all those interesting trivialities we used to purse. Once
again, I think Williams’s outline of an ethical structure in which different interests
compete is better suited to explaining how we deal with emergency situations: we may
feel certain obligations to help in cases of dire emergency, but the fact that we consider
other things to be important means that we don’t want to let the emergency cases
dominate our lives. Our resistance to this domination can be expressed in several ways.
We can – and perhaps all too often do – ignore emergency situations. We may also
recognise our sense of obligation and do something – perhaps something inadequate – in
order to alleviate the situation. This may be explained by the claim that the boundaries of
our sense of immediate obligation are quite flexible: we do recognise some positive
obligations to help beyond our immediate circle, but the force of these obligations is
weaker – this is the point I discussed above. However, the existence of proper institutions
that deal with emergency situations may create obligations that did not exist before,
because they allow us to express our sense of obligation in meaningful ways. Finally, it
may be the case that our pursuit of some of the things that we hold to be important may
result in a desirable situation regarding famine and hunger as a “side effect”: this is a
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point I want to explore further, although I will need to look at some background
considerations first.
v) Standing interests
Williams describes another category of considerations besides the vital interests that are
threatened in emergency cases. This second category consists of standing interests that
are of “basic and standing importance” (ELP, p. 185) to us. These interests create
obligations, but “they are all negative in force, concerning what we should not do” (ELP,
p. 185). Both the positive obligation to help in emergency cases and these negative
obligations create rights: Williams states, “Considerations that are given deliberative
priority in order to secure reliability constitute obligations; corresponding to these
obligations are rights, possessed by people who benefit from the obligations” (ELP, p.
185). Unfortunately, neither of these categories are able to secure the sort of strong
obligation to help in famine relief cases that Singer demands: on the one hand, the
positive obligations imposed by emergencies do not extend far enough. On the other
hand, the standing interests are inapplicable; famines seem to require us to do something
positive to help, but the category of standing interests only includes negative obligations.
There are several possible lines of discussion here. Firstly, we can ask whether famine is
a special case of a standing interest that does create a positive form of obligation. People
certainly have a standing interest in having enough food to avoid starving to death. If this
means that they have a right to food, doesn’t this generate a positive obligation on
wealthy nations to provide that food? Williams can respond to this in the following way:
It may be that we want to secure something very valuable through such obligations, but it
is not always clear that the action we are obliged to do will actually secure the desired
result; for example, enforcing an obligation to make a large donation to a famine relief
charity might be ineffective or worse if the charity is inefficient or incompetent, or if it
transfers most of the money directly to the corrupt political leader of a poor country.
The second line of discussion relates to the question of making our obligations explicit.
Williams is suspicious of the claim that all moral problems can be addressed using some
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sort of “moral calculus”. He suggests that many of our obligations are best secured if we
pass over them in silence;
An effective way for actions to be ruled out is that they never come into thought
at all, and this is often the best way. One does not feel easy with the man who in
the course of a discussion of how to deal with political or business rivals says, Of
course, we could have them killed, but we should lay that aside right from the
beginning.’ It should never have come into his hands to be laid aside (ELP, p.
185).
At first sight, this approach seems spectacularly inappropriate as a way of addressing the
problems of world hunger. In this case, the connection between our societies and poor
countries seems very unclear. The possibility that our actions might have negative effects
such as producing famines simply does not occur to many people in the West. This is a
point made by Pogge in his discussion of global justice; “The idea that our economic
policies and the global economic institutions we impose make us causally and morally
responsible for the perpetuation – even aggravation – of world hunger…is an idea rarely
taken seriously by established intellectuals and politicians in the developed world” (PGJ,
p. 15). Simply passing over the connection between world hunger and global justice
seems inappropriate because the existence of a connection was never clear to the people
responsible for the policies and institutions in the first place. One way of reading
Williams’s approach to ethics is to argue that we can make peoples’ obligations clear to
them if we relate their actions to effects that damage the standing interests of other
people. However, this interpretation runs against the grain of his approach. Williams does
not deny that we have obligations to other people. Neither does he deny that these
obligations have any force over us. He states, “It is a mistake of morality to try to make
everything into obligations” (ELP, p. 180): as we have seen, he is concerned to avoid the
intrusion of obligations into too many areas of life. I want to look in some detail at the
possibility that we can promote the interest of preventing world hunger indirectly using
one particular ethical concern without using the language of obligations. The particular
concern I have in mind is justice. Before developing this argument, I will need to sketch
Williams’s account of this concern, and I will need to show how it contributes to the
prevention of world hunger.
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vi) Williams’s account of justice
Williams does not go into much detail about justice in Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy. However, I think what he does say gives us enough to work with here.
Firstly, he states, “Justice and injustice are certainly ethical notions” (ELP, p. 165). His
second point is, “It may be that considerations of justice are a central element of ethical
thought that transcends the relativism of distance” (ELP, p. 166). The first point is that
justice is ethical; this means that it will be ranked as something important according to
Williams: “On any adequate showing, ethical motivations are going to be important”
(ELP, p. 185). However, justice is a special case in this respect, because it seems to cross
the boundaries between the ethical and the self-interested; some ethical concerns may be
beyond self-interest, but justice seems to be something we are also interested in securing
for ourselves. It is not only ethically important, but also important in a more personal,
self-interested sense. However, the second point suggests that justice has some degree of
universality – it “transcends relativism”. One consequence of this is that we cannot secure
justice for ourselves without also securing it for other people. It seems nonsensical to
propose institutions that are just only for us: this would undermine their very claim to be
just. My point here is that justice is something that we can pursue from within the
perspective of our own self interest, so it is important to us in a narrow sense. It is
ethically important too, though, because it reaches beyond us to the interests of other
people.
vii) Justice and Global Institutions
The next point I need to look at emerges from Pogge’s discussion of global justice. Pogge
points out several ways in which the current global economic and political order is unjust;
In fact, there are at least three morally significant connections between us and the
global poor. First, their social starting positions and ours have emerged from a
single historical process that was pervaded by massive and grievous wrongs. The
same historical injustices, including genocide, colonialism, and slavery, play a
role in explaining both their poverty and our affluence. Second, they and we
depend on a single natural resource base, from the benefits of which they are
largely, and without compensation, excluded. The affluent countries and the elites
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of the developing world divide these resources on mutually agreeable terms
without leaving ‘enough and as good’ for the remaining majority of humankind.
Third, they and we coexist within a single global economic order that has a strong
tendency to perpetuate and even to aggravate global economic inequality (PGJ, p.
15).
The corrupt heads of poor states are allowed to borrow from rich states, which further
impoverishes the citizens of the poor states. Similarly, heads of poor states are able to
exploit natural resources without passing any benefits on to their citizens; again, their
citizens are impoverished. This impoverishment can contribute significantly to the risk of
hunger, famine and other problems; as Pogge points out, poor people have little
opportunity to assert their interests against corrupt and incompetent governments, so they
are at risk from the choices those governments may make. Furthermore, LaFollette
observes that poverty is a significant factor in famines because it affects peoples' ability
to access food even when it is present; in Bangladesh, “The problem…is that the families
had insufficient ‘entitlements’ to food. These ‘entitlements’ are determined not only by
what the person can produce, but also what they can buy and what is made available to
them” (WH, p. 242). All of this shows that the unjust nature of world economic and
political institutions is a contributing factor to famines; these institutions fail to prevent
poverty. As a result, put people at risk from incompetent government and leave them
unable to access food. Pogge’s argument is that making global economic and political
institutions more just will alleviate many of these problems6.
viii) Williams and Pogge
Williams may not disagree that just political and economic institutions are a priority. He
presumably would also not object to the idea that famine and world hunger are serious
ethical issues. However, there is much that he would disagree with in Pogge’s account.
6
Utilitarians might try to exploit the conception of justice that I have outlined here. It is a
common argument against utilitarianism that it has no place for a conception of justice.
This conception of justice does seem to fit with the instrumentalist concerns of
utilitarianism, since pursuing justice seems to secure the desirable outcome of reducing
world hunger. The problem is that any “instrumentalist” conception of justice is going to
be too fragile and vulnerable to instrumental concerns: it would be too easy to abandon
the conception if there turn out to be other, unjust, ways of securing the desired outcome.
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Firstly, as we have seen, he would object to the claim that there are “morally significant
connections” between us and the global poor. Furthermore, Pogge concludes “We have
then not merely a positive responsibility with regard to global poverty, like Rawls’s ‘duty
of assistance’, but a negative responsibility to stop imposing the existing global order”
(PGJ, p. 22). It is presumably not too serious an equivocation to suggest that
‘responsibility’ and ‘obligation’ are roughly equivalent here. If so, Williams might also
object to the claim that promoting global justice can best be explained in terms of our
moral obligations to the world’s poor. Pogge’s claims about justice and poverty are
interesting here, but I think Williams would reject the claim that these claims produce a
moral obligation to pursue global justice. One reason for this is that Williams objects to
the idea of blame in questions of social justice; “an assessment in terms of justice can,
more obviously than others, be conducted without involving the unhelpful question of
whether anyone was to blame” (ELP, p. 165). Pogge is moderate in his attribution of guilt
for current world injustices: “Perhaps we had reason to believe our own persistent
pronouncements that the new global economic architecture would cease the reproduction
of poverty. So perhaps we just made an innocent and blameless mistake. But it is our
mistake nonetheless, and we must not allow it to kill yet further tens of millions in the
developing world” (PGJ, p. 15). However, I think this is still strong enough to draw fire
from Williams, since it is concerned with attributing faults to particular groups. Pogge’s
language of moral persuasion is more moderate than Singer’s is, but I think it is still
vulnerable to the same criticism Williams directs at Singer. “Some utilitarian writers aim
to increase a sense of indeterminate guilt in their readers…Peter Singer is an
example…As moral persuasion, this kind of tactic is likely to be counterproductive and to
lead to a defensive and resentful contraction of concern” (ELP, p. 212, n. 7). Pogge is
probably not guilty of the same rhetorical manipulation as Singer, but he is still at risk
from this defensive contraction because he seems to attribute some guilt to Western
societies for current global injustices. The point here is not the actual existence or
attribution of such guilt, but rather its relevance to the task of persuading people to make
current global institutions more just. If guilt puts people on the defensive about the
institutions they uphold, using it as a persuasive tactic may undermine our aims.
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What, then, is appropriate as a form of persuasion in these circumstances? I argued above
that justice is not merely an ethical interest. It has a strong ethical dimension, but it also
connects with more self-interested concerns. If our aim is to make existing institutions
more just, we may be better off presenting justice in a way that appeals to this selfinterest: we may appeal directly to the sense that justice is something people are
interested in from a personal perspective. We may also appeal to the sense that justice is
an important factor in the proper, efficient functioning of global institutions. These
arguments remain to be developed, but if they can contribute to the force of arguments
for just global and economic institutions, they will be worth pursuing.
The two points I have made about global justice fit together in the following way. Pogge
makes a case that pursuing justice secures the moral aim of reducing people’s
vulnerability to famine. I have agreed that justice might well secure this aim by allowing
people fairer access to the wealth of their natural resources and by allowing them to
pursue more competent and legitimate political institutions. However, I have questioned
whether expressing this argument in terms of moral responsibilities or obligations on the
globally powerful is the best way to proceed in securing the outcome Pogge predicts.
Williams makes the argument (perhaps more psychological or rhetorical than
philosophical) that these attempts to attribute guilt and moral responsibility may turn out
to be counterproductive if they put people on the defensive with regard to their moral
culpability for situations like famines. Another way of making this point is that, if
globally powerful politicians, economists and intellectuals have not recognised their
moral responsibilities in this area yet (as Pogge himself points out), there is a possibility
that they never will recognise those moral responsibilities.
However, this criticism does not necessarily mean that we have to abandon the pursuit of
justice as a way of securing a global order that protects people from the risk of poverty,
hunger and famine. I have argued that justice is a special case of the category of things
we find important. It is ethical because it extends beyond our own interests, possibly to
the extent of being universal. However, it is important to people from within their own
narrow interests too. The result of this is that we may be able to mobilise arguments that
appeal to the interests of the globally powerful without being forced to rely exclusively
on moral arguments.
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Conclusion
I have pursued two lines of argument against Singer’s approach to famine relief. The first
looked at Williams’s claim that general moral demands are inappropriate to ethics
because they create moral obligations that threaten to dominate our lives. Without other
interests that conflict with our obligations, there is no limit to the scope of those
obligations. I argued that Williams’s arguments against morality make the circle of
obligation too small. We can feel obligations that extend beyond the circle of immediacy,
although these are less intense. Furthermore, we can establish intermediate institutions
that allow us to respond to those obligations. These institutions allow us to respond to
emergency situations in a meaningful way; in some circumstances, they may even create
obligations to respond that were not present before. However, it is not clear how far we
can push the comparison between domestic institutions like the fire brigade and
international relief agencies; the latter seem to rely on ad hoc funding in response to
particular disasters, and governments do not control them in the same way as stateorganised emergency services. However, I have tried to show that a sense of obligation
can exist beyond the narrow circle of our immediate concern with emergency cases. If we
are to respond to that sense of obligation, it is worth pursuing the possibility of better
organised, centralised emergency relief agencies at the international level.
The second line of argument is based on Pogge’s claim that promoting a just global
economic and political order is the best way to prevent famine situations; the point here is
that just institutions prevent the poverty and political impotence that make people
vulnerable to famine. I agreed with Pogge’s claims about justice, but I disagree that those
claims create exclusively moral pressure on people with power over global political
institutions. Following Williams, I suggested that this might be counterproductive.
Instead, it may be better to express the concerns that we have about global justice in
terms that connect with other interests of the globally powerful. I suggested that justice is
a good candidate here because it promotes what we want to achieve – a reduction in
world poverty – but that it crosses the boundaries between broad ethical concerns and
narrower self-interested ones. It is worth pursuing the claim that just institutions prevent
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world hunger from within an ethical perspective that rates such a concern as a high
priority. However, it is also worth pursuing the claim that just institutions are still in the
interest of people who do not necessarily share this ethical perspective.
This leaves us with two priorities with regard to global hunger. The first is the pursuit of
intermediate institutions that allow people to express their obligations in emergency cases
in a meaningful way. The second is the pursuit of a just global economic and political
order. The final thing I want to do is to relate these two priorities to each other. Williams
suggests that we need to keep our obligations within reasonable limits; this is the core of
his argument against Singer. I argued that one way of doing this is to set up intermediate
institutions that allow people to express their obligations in a limited and meaningful way
when they occur. However, if we do not also put preventative limits on the likelihood of
emergency situations occurring in the first place, our obligations may still exert undue
pressure. In the case of famine, the pursuit of a just economic and political order is a
preventative measure that we can take. Doing so reduces the number of possible
emergencies, and thus reduces the pressure on any institutions that we might set up to
deal with genuine emergencies. As a result, I argue that the pursuit of just institution
should take priority over the establishment of an intermediary organisation. It is only
when these reasonable limits are in place that an intermediary institution for emergency
help becomes a possibility; it is only when preventative structural measures are in place
that it is possible to set up an institution that does not place an undue strain on our
obligation to help people at risk of famine.
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