A Companion to Ethics by Singer Peter

Author:Singer, Peter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2013-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

vi The duty to alleviate poverty

Why then do we have a duty to help alleviate poverty in other countries? It is not being suggested that we do not have a duty to help alleviate poverty in our own society. On the other hand, we would not suppose that one normally had a duty to help alleviate poverty in another rich country like France or the United States.

The basic background assumption is this. A so-called rich country has the resources to alleviate poverty and other forms of serious suffering within its own borders and has further resources which it can use to help alleviate poverty in other countries which lack the resources to alleviate extreme suffering. The general force of this argument is not weakened if one accepts that in practice public services and private caring do not in fact adequately meet all the needs of people in rich countries, and that governments and rich people within poor countries do not do all they can either. The argument is concerned with resources and what could be done, not with what is done.

A further point is relevant. Whilst we should certainly care for those less fortunate within our own societies or support publicly funded education, healthcare and other services, the poverty in poorer countries is on the whole far greater than the poverty and problems that face people in rich countries. That greater degree of poverty gives it a certain moral urgency or seriousness which, if one thinks one has a duty to care at all, will weigh in deciding what to support. I say ‘urgency’ rather than ‘priority’ because the idea of priority suggests that one could put evils into some kind of order of degree or kind and then say: ‘Alleviate these first, then when that is done these, and so on’. But this is not how we either do, or should, determine the ways in which to express our caring. There are many complicating factors.

One of these has to do with cost effectiveness. Clearly one may be able to make more difference with a unit of resource helping to alleviate a lesser evil in one’s own society than helping to alleviate a greater evil elsewhere. This is one of the sources of the commonly-stated resistance to overseas assistance, namely ‘charity begins at home’. Here ‘home’ means ‘our own society’ and the implication is that charity ends here too. However, it is clear that this is not always so: £10 to an overseas aid organization may actually do more good than £10 to a domestic charity. In any case it overlooks the fact that, as I said, there is a special moral urgency or seriousness attached to absolute poverty. Should we say: the more evil something is, the greater moral reason there is, other things being equal, to reduce it?

We can in fact identify three aspects of extreme poverty which make it a serious evil. First, it is significantly life-shortening. Second, it involves great suffering and pain (from disease and hunger).

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