PHIL 104 (STOLZE)
Notes on Heather Widdows,
Global Ethics: An
Introduction, chapter 7
Poverty and Inequality as Ethical Problems
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Relative vs. Absolute Poverty
Rising Economic Inequality in the United States
Four Ethical Responses
 Utilitarianism (Peter Singer)
 Kantianism (Onora O’Neill)
 Cosmopolitanism/Negative Rights (Thomas Pogge)
 Capability (Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum)
Problems with Aid
Relative vs. Absolute Poverty
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Relative poverty = “poor by comparison to others in [one’s own] society” (p. 192). The
U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2010 the nation’s official poverty rate was 15.1
percent, up from 14.3 percent in 2009 ─ the third consecutive annual increase in the
poverty rate. There were 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010, up from 43.6 million in
2009 ─ the fourth consecutive annual increase and the largest number in the 52 years
for which poverty estimates have been published. In 2010 the number of people without
health insurance was 49.9 million or 16.3%.
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Absolute (or extreme) poverty = “not having enough income to meet the most basic
human needs for adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation, health care or
education” (p. 191). The World Bank has established an absolute “poverty line” of an
income of $1.25 per day per person, below which the total number of people has varied
from 1.8 billion in 1981 to 1.3 billion in 2005. As of 2008, 950 million people in the world
were malnourished. The annual death toll from poverty-related causes is 18 million, or
one third of all human deaths.
Rising Economic Inequality in the United States
“The top 1 percent of households have secured a very large share of all of
the gains in income—59.9 percent of the gains from 1979–2007, while the
top 0.1 percent seized an even more disproportionate share—36 percent. In
comparison, only 8.6 percent of income gains have gone to the bottom 90
percent. The patterns are similar for wages and capital income. As they have
accrued a large share of income gains, the incomes of the top 1 percent of
households have pulled far away from the incomes of typical Americans. In
2007, average annual incomes of the top 1 percent of households were 42
times greater than incomes of the bottom 90 percent (up from 14 times
greater in 1979) and incomes of the top 0.1 percent were 220 times greater
(up from 47 times greater in 1979).”
(From Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens, “Occupy Wall Streeters are Right about Skewed
Economic Rewards in the United States” [www.epi.org/publication/bp331-occupy-wallstreet/].)
The Drowning Child Thought Experiment
“On my way to give a lecture, I pass a shallow ornamental pond and
notice that a small child has fallen in and is in danger of drowning. I look
around to see where the parents, or babysitter, are, but to my surprise, I
see that there is no one else around. It seems that it is up to me to make
sure that the child doesn’t drown. Would anyone deny that I ought to
wade in and pull the child out? This will mean getting my clothes muddy,
ruining my shoes and either cancelling my lecture or delaying it until I can
find something dry to change into; but compared with the avoidable
death of a child none of these things are significant” (p. 199).
Singer’s Basic Argument
1. If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of
comparable significance, we ought to do it.
2. Extreme poverty is bad.
3. There is some extreme poverty we can prevent without sacrificing
anything of comparable moral significance.
4. Therefore, we ought to prevent some extreme poverty.
Utilitarian Elements of Singer’s Approach
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It is universal.
It follows principles of impartiality and equity.
Morality is determined in terms of maximizing utility.
Moral goodness is understood as the maximal reduction of suffering (if
not quite the maximization of the good).
An Objection to
the Drowning Child Thought Experiment
Singer’s analogy is weak: Singer fails to identify the structural obstacles
that prevent the child from being rescued. A better analogy would point
out that there is an intricate apparatus (e.g., netting or scaffolding) above
the pond that not only (a) prevents the child from escaping on its own but
also (b) makes it extremely difficult for individuals alone to know how to
extricate the child from this apparatus; what is needed is combined and
collective action to free the child. In other words, politics and not just
charity is required to solve the problem of world poverty.
Poverty and Structural Violence
In The Condition of the Working Class in England (New York: Oxford, 1993), his classic
indictment of the negative social effects resulting from nineteenth-century capitalism,
Friedrich Engels wrote:
“If one individual inflicts a bodily injury upon another which leads to the death of the
person attacked we call it manslaughter; on the other hand, if the attacker knows
beforehand that the blow will be fatal we call it murder. Murder has also been committed if
society places hundreds of workers in such a position that they inevitably come to
premature and unnatural ends. Their death is as violent as if they had been stabbed or
shot . . . Murder has been committed if thousands of workers have been deprived of the
necessities of life or if they have been forced into a situation in which it is impossible for
them to survive . . . Murder has been committed if society knows perfectly well that
thousands of workers cannot avoid being sacrificed so long as these conditions are
allowed to continue. Murder of this sort is just as culpable as the murder committed by an
individual. At first sight it does not appear to be murder at all because responsibility for the
death of the victim cannot be pinned on any individual assailant. Everyone is responsible
and yet no one is responsible, because it appears as if the victim has died from natural
causes. If a worker dies no one places the responsibility for his death on society, though
some would realize that society has failed to take steps to prevent the victim from dying.
But it is murder all the same” (pp. 106-7).
Another Thought Experiment
“There was once a village along a river. The people who lived here were
very kind. These people, according to parable, began noticing increasing
numbers of drowning people caught in the river’s swift current. And so
they went to work devising ever more elaborate technologies to resuscitate
them. So preoccupied were these heroic villagers with rescue and
treatment that they never thought to look upstream to see who was
pushing the victims in.”
—Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal
Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, 2nd edition (New York: Da
Capo Press, 2010), p. ix.
Objections to Giving
• Taking care of our own
• Property rights
• Population and the ethics of triage
• Leaving it to the government
• Too high a standard
Onora O’Neill on Global Poverty
• O’Neill’s Kantian approach is based on obligations instead of rights.
• She argues that the primary focus should be on the obligations that
better-off nations and institutions have to the worst off.
• She contends that the burden of responsibility is not on the poor to
demand their rights but on the rich, who have an absolute duty to
address poverty.
Kantian Elements of O’Neill’s Approach
• It is universal.
• It uses the categorical imperative (the criterion of “universalizability”) to
determine obligations.
• It prioritizes duty.
• It respects individual persons and their needs as “ends in themselves”
and never as means to something else.
A Different Perspective:
Thomas Pogge on Global Poverty
• As opposed to Singer, Thomas Pogge (especially in his book World Poverty and Human
Rights, 2nd edition [Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008]) denies that duties to the poor are
positive duties to lend assistance; he reframes them as negative duties not to harm.
• According to Pogge, we are not responsible for doing something about global poverty
because we are bystanders who have simply stood by and done nothing as an unjust
state of affairs has developed. On the contrary, if we don’t act to help the world’s poor,
then we have failed in our negative duty to stop bringing about the injustice. As a result,
we have responsibilities because of our previous actions rather than our inaction. The
heart of Pogge’s position is that global poverty is the direct responsibility of the richer
world: we have caused the poverty and directly harmed the poor. We should stop
causing this harm!
• Objection: Poverty is not primarily caused by the international order but rather by
unstable—and often brutal and corrupt—regimes governing poorer and developing
countries.
• Pogge’s Response: Even if we haven’t directly caused the poverty in other countries,
we still have positive duties if we continue to recognize, trade, or interact with their
regimes.
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum on Global
Poverty
• Sen and Nussbaum are especially critical of (1) utilitarian approaches
because “they do not take account of the differences between individuals
and their different needs” and (2) “primary goods” approaches because
“they assume that all people are basically the same, with the same
needs” (p. 169).
• Their approach is “to be concerned with the reality of people’s
experiences rather than with external measures,” and so they focus on
“the actual capability of agents to ‘be’ and to ‘do’: a person’s ‘beings’ and
‘doings’. Capability is aboiut what a person is able to be and do
determined by the background social context, the endowments of the
individual and opportunities and choices afforded to the individual” (p.
169).
• They understand freedom in more concrete, positive ways than do
abstract, negative liberal models to to be “left alone”: for example, they
stress the importance of “freedom from malaria” or “freedom from
hunger.”
Advantages of Nussbaum and Sen’s Capability
Approach
• It has a global framework.
• It is local and context-sensitive.
• It includes individual and group values.
Problems with Aid
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Responsive and emergency focused.
Reduces rather than build capacity and infrastructure.
Top-down rather than bottom up.
Relies on an economic view of development.
Encourages corruption.
Used to meet other political and economic agendas.
Sustainable Approaches to Aid
• Reliance on “local facilitators” and bottom-up instead of “top-down”
assistance.
• Micro-finance that offers loans to small businesses in poor countries.
• Fairtrade = stress on long-term development instead of short-term needs
of the poor; “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man
to fish and you feed him for life.” (Christian Aid’s slogan)
• Consumer boycotts of sweatshop-produced products.
• Ethical shopping, e.g., for clothing, coffee, chocolate.