The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy / Edition 1

by Deen K. Chatterjee

Overview

The essays in this volume present the latest beliefs of some leading contemporary moral and political philosophers on the issue of assisting the foreign poor. Topics focus around the themes of political responsibility of governments of affluent countries to relieve poverty abroad and the personal responsibility of individuals to assist the distant needy. This timely volume will interest scholars in ethics, political philosophy, political theory, international law and development economics, as well as policy makers, aid agency workers, and general readers interested in the topics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521527422
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/08/2004
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Public Policy
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

Deen K. Chatterjee is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His areas of specialization are political philosophy, applied ethics, and philosophy of religion and culture. He is co-editor of Globalization, Development and Democracy (2003), and Ethics and Foreign Intervention (Cambridge, 2003).

Read an Excerpt

Cambridge University Press
0521820421 - The Ethics of Assistance - Morality and the Distant Needy - Edited by - Deen K. Chatterjee
Excerpt

Chapter 1


Introduction

DEEN K. CHATTERJEE

This collection of chapters seeks to describe our duties to help those who are in need but who are strangers to us due to distance - physical or otherwise. If we have duties and obligations toward each other in everyday moral contexts, should these duties be extended to the distant needy? If so, what should be the nature and role of institutions implementing such duties beyond our own borders of special ties and communities? Though moral philosophers have pondered these questions in the past, such issues have recently become the focus of especially intense debate. Today we live in a world in which spheres of interaction are constantly expanding, while advanced technology makes it easy to reach the distant needy and vividly broadcast their plight to all. In parallel with the growth of these global relationships, there has been an enormous increase in ethicists' interest in questions regarding the morality of affluence in a world of poverty and the individual's response to it. In addition to creating new perspectives on individual moral obligation, this discussion is transforming political philosophy. While the initial florescence of interest in theories of justice that began with John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) solely concerned relationships among fellow-citizens, theorists of social justice now frequently attend to issues of global inequity and institutional responses to it.

Peter Singer's seminal article "Famine, Affluence and Morality" (1972) has been a central focus of debate over the individual's obligation to respond to the distant needy. Singer argued that we are as much obliged to help a distant stranger in dire need as we are to help somebody in extreme distress who is in close proximity to us. Intuitively, we seem to have stronger moral obligations to those who are physically or affectively near than to those who are remote. Distance seems to set moral boundaries, and distant strangers are accorded minimal moral concern. Singer's article questioned these intuitive assumptions, arguing that closer scrutiny of the differences between the near and the distant reveals nothing that could justify the usual deadly neglect of the distant needy.

Singer's primary concern was the duty of individuals in affluent countries to send money to overseas charities. However, there are several approaches to remedying poverty-related miseries in addition to aid of the sort that individuals can provide. They include foreign aid from governments (both unilateral and via multinational organizations), debt forgiveness, a new international economic order, more equitable trade policies, compensation for past wrongs, and help in consolidating transitions from unjust to more just forms of government. They require political and institutional directives on a wide range of issues related to poverty and deprivation. This volume puts all these strategies as well as the individual's obligation to help under the general topic of assistance. It leaves out the topic of humanitarian military intervention to assist the distant needy, which is the theme of another related volume (see Preface).

In Part I, Peter Singer, Richard Arneson, F. M. Kamm, and Judith Lichtenberg address broad questions about the moral significance of distance, primarily attending to its importance or unimportance to an individual's duty to aid others, rather than to political duties of support for institutions. Singer considers a variety of special relationships which, according to his critics, create grounds for bias in aid that would block his original arguments for an enormously demanding duty of aid to the foreign poor. While discerning impartialist reasons to give some scope to these forms of partiality, he argues that they require no substantial change in his original view. Singer also assesses John Rawls' The Law of Peoples and finds it inadequate in regard to assisting the poor nations in meeting the basic needs of their people. (The chapters in Part Ⅲ discuss the law of peoples in greater detail.) Singer's chapter concludes with a note on human nature and the motivation to assist - an important issue that is the topic of Lichtenberg's chapter.

Arneson claims that Singer was right in 1972 when he argued that there is no morally significant difference between a drowning child nearby and a distant stranger who is in dire need. So, if we are obliged to help the child even at a considerable cost to ourselves, we have a similarly demanding duty to help distant strangers. After criticizing less demanding doctrines of duty, Arneson seeks to reduce resistance to Singer's stern demand by further specifying its subject-matter. Distance makes no difference to questions of right and wrong, but it does affect blame-worthiness and morally appropriate guilt.

Kamm argues that distance does matter morally yet she also argues that distance between aider and aidee is just part of a larger package of morally relevant spatial relationships, including, for example, closeness to the potential aider of means of aid. Her total account of the ways in which nearness is morally important allows for strong duties to aid a distant stranger while also affording nearness of aider and aidee special moral significance.

Whatever the proper moral relevance of distance, its psychological influence is widely acknowledged. But the kinds of distance that affect propensities to give and the mechanisms responsible for these connections are in need of specific, empirically informed description, if undue effects of distance are to be reduced. Lichtenberg discusses this issue of the moral psychology of distance in her chapter. She claims that people in general are not motivated to aid the distant needy even if they are in a position to do so. Accordingly, she argues, instead of engaging in the empty rhetoric of obligations to give aid, it makes more sense to see how, in a morally permissible manner, people can be made more prone to giving. This chapter illustrates and supplements the Singer problematic with which the volume begins.

The vast majority of non-philosophers believe that ties of community - political, social, or cultural - create special duties of aid. Any global impartiality will run counter to this commonly held bias toward moral closeness. The two chapters in Part Ⅱ deal with alternative kinds of community and the obligations they generate. Richard Miller contends that we should balance national concerns and international needs in the political sphere. While giving a philosophical defense of our ordinary biases toward moral closeness, and arguing that equal respect needn't mean equal concern for all, Miller contends that the grounds for these biases also entail corresponding but less demanding reasons to help the foreign poor. Just citizens, he argues, have special duties to compatriots because of fellow-citizens' role in coercively imposing rules of self-advancement on one another and their just expectation of loyal allegiance to centrally important shared institutions. However, similar, though weaker considerations of coercion and loyalty currently create duties to aid poor foreigners in our global world. Duties of world community add to the force of mere humanitarian requirements even if they fall short of duties of political community. Miller's chapter provides a challenging contrast to Singer and Arneson and tries to work out a position believable to non-philosophers who may have trouble with the extent of Singer's rigorous moral demands.

David Miller explores the idea of independent political communities and their duties of international justice. He contends that because all such political communities are culturally unique, no general principle of redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor communities will work, though rich communities have an obligation to ensure a minimum level of human well-being in poor communities. International justice must ensure that all political communities are able to determine their own future and administer justice among their members, and be held responsible for their falling below the minimum standard of well-being if their own political and social policies lead to it. Miller's view of the (often) national sources of bad development is, at the very least, in tension with Thomas Pogge's emphasis, in Part Ⅳ, on a skewed international economic system benefiting the rich countries.

The chapters in the next two groups approach questions of international assistance from perspectives sympathetic to John Rawls' liberalism, though they are sometimes critical of Rawls' specific claims concerning its international implications. In contrast to the relatively limited duties of global assistance constrained by the demands of communities, they exhibit a more impartial and demanding duty to help the distant needy, though not as demanding as the cosmopolitan claims made by Singer and Arneson in the first part.

In his ground-breaking inquiry, A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls defended liberal egalitarian principles of justice among fellow-members of a single society as the social contract that would result from hypothetical deliberations in which members of a society assumed to be self-sufficient seek to pursue their individual interests in ignorance of the nature of their goals and resources. Although others have extended this conception of justice as fairness to the world at large, Rawls himself determines international justice, in The Law of Peoples (1999), by hypothetical deliberations between representatives of sovereign peoples, not individuals, which result in much more moderate requirements of international equality and relatively high barriers to international intervention. In Part Ⅲ, Martha Nussbaum, Erin Kelly, and Charles Beitz assess Rawls' account of global justice and the duty to assist. Nussbaum holds that though Rawls is sensitive to the issues of global inequalities, especially as they affect women, he doesn't adequately deal with certain important issues in his scheme of global justice. These inadequacies point to general shortcomings in his theory that adversely affect all oppressed groups, especially women. Nussbaum specifically faults Rawls for his weak requirement for basic human rights protection, offered as accommodating decent but hierarchical societies in the society of peoples. She believes that Rawls should have applied the same person-centered principle of domestic liberal justice to the global arena because the fundamental unit of justice is the person, not sovereign peoples. Nussbaum contends that states, being the institutions of the basic structure of society, have more moral significance than groups or peoples because states have the structural mechanism for justice that allows individuals to express their autonomy. Still, Nussbaum's liberal cosmopolitanism does not find the nation-state paradigm fully adequate for global justice in today's world.

In contrast to Nussbaum, Kelly's chapter, which follows a broadly Rawlsian approach toward moral responsibility in the global community, finds the narrow construal of human rights a useful tool in framing foreign policy imperatives. She claims that the international community has a duty to assist the burdened or failed states in attaining a decent minimum, a duty she defends and specifies as the outcome of a reasonable consensus respectful of the global diversity of groups, cultures and values. All nations have a moral obligation to ensure, through their foreign policies, that no society fails to provide access to such rights for its citizens. Such a foreign policy imperative could range from non-coercive aid, development assistance, and reforming international institutions and treaties to coercive measures including military intervention in rare cases. Given the resources available to the rich and powerful countries, Kelly believes that they have a prime responsibility to assist the poor nations, within the limits of a decent minimum. This limit, which goes beyond the Rawlsian idea of assistance (helping the poor nations in attaining the institutions of liberal or decent societies) still falls far short of the more egalitarian requirements that Nussbaum, Beitz, Thomas Pogge, and others have defended, which more closely resemble Rawls' domestic model of egalitarian justice.

In his essay on the nature of human rights, Charles Beitz develops a practical and political account, as opposed to the foundational and normative account that is standard among political philosophers. Sympathetic to Rawls' emphasis on the practice of public discourse among agents with diverse perspectives, Beitz seeks to describe the nature of human rights in terms of the functions that appeals to human rights play in international justification and criticism of governments' conduct. Beitz takes this broadly Rawlsian methodology to give shape and substance to rights to subsistence that are not much discussed in Rawls' own work. In Beitz's view, the human rights illuminated by the practical approach correspond to demanding obligations, even if the remedy is not as demanding and urgent as Singer's and Arneson's arguments suggest. One question prompted by his chapter is what the proper role of normative, foundational arguments ought to be. Normative theorists regard practical consequences as essential to the evaluation of institutions, and disagreements as to what rights have the obligatory status Beitz describes may depend on normative and foundational arguments for their resolution. If this dependence is pervasive and unavoidable, the division of labor between the practical-political and normative-foundational might, in the final analysis, be close to the expectations of orthodox, foundational philosophers.

Following the lead of the authors in Part Ⅲ, all three contributors in Part Ⅳ call on philosophers doing work on human rights and poverty alleviation to be more specific with respect to the assignment of duties to institutions and more knowledgeable about the empirical facts and contending policies. Henry Shue's point about applied ethics incorporating empirical understanding and operationalizing rights-respecting duties is an illustration of this move. Shue does this via a defense of a middle way between thick localism and thin universalism and a critique of Michael Walzer's and Charles Taylor's localism. Shue acknowledges localists' concern that liberal theories of rights have suffered from excessive abstraction. This he believes is due to lack of an adequate account of positive duties, which is needed to understand the implementation of any rights, positive or negative. However, Shue believes that to construe such an account one needn't go the communitarian way of thick localism - one can have a richly embedded notion of rights without being locked into any one specific culture as Walzer and Taylor suppose. Appealing to realities of current global practice, Shue emphasizes the actual vitality of cross-cultural discourse concerning human rights and the heterogeneity of religious and cultural communities such as Islam which tend to be treated as uniformly committed to restrictive views.

Like Shue, Onora O'Neill is concerned about empty rhetoric of rights. (In the first part of this anthology, Judith Lichtenberg responds to what she perceives as the empty rhetoric of obligations.) O'Neill claims that if rights are to be taken seriously - especially the rights of the poor in developing countries - then there has to be a substantive notion of obligation, based on a realistic and fair account of the agents and the agencies capable of discharging them. She believes that neither the utilitarian nor the rights-based cosmopolitan theories, both of which she labels as " abstract cosmopolitanism," have paid enough attention to the empirical details of who ought to do what for whom. When weak states cannot provide for urgent needs of their citizens, O'Neill suggests that non-state agencies such as NGOs or TNCs should be accorded a larger role in the ascription of duties of international economic justice. She claims that states or multi-governmental agencies such as the United Nations are not the only, and sometimes not the most capable, institutions for projecting economic justice into developing nations. She believes that in the absence of efficient reform of state or international institutions, which may take a long time, it is imperative to look into the prospect of NGOs and TNCs as effective international benefactors. Such supplementary strategies could make a meaningful difference by providing viable grounds for rights claims.

Thomas Pogge's chapter is about real-world mechanisms by which the poor get poor and are kept poor, and by which they can overcome their poverty. Pogge argues for more extensive measures to reduce international inequality than Rawls requires, basing this stronger egalitarianism on specific features of current international relationships rather than general principles of aid to those in need. He holds that poor countries are being harmed through an inequitable global order, continuously shaped and coercively imposed by affluent countries that benefit from the consequent inequalities. The causal and moral responsibility of rich nations for the deprivations of individuals in poor nations is endemic in the international economic order, not isolated to some specific cases of transgressions. Pogge believes that the removal of such burdens by the beneficiaries is the sort of negative duty (to stop harming) whose force is in no way mitigated by considerations of distance or culture. Conformity to this duty requires a fundamental economic and political reform in the current global order, a reform that Pogge calls "re-redistribution." Though this may sound like a tall order, Pogge believes such a reform would not unduly compromise the lifestyle of the citizens of affluent nations. He views external aid and country-specific development efforts as less important than the duty to change the international economic order.

The chapters in this collection challenge and defend assumptions about the moral importance of distance that are among the most deep-seated convictions concerning individual morality and political choice. In addition to suggesting new perspectives on aid to needy strangers, they use the current debate over the moral implications of distance to shed light on enduring questions about morality as a whole, such as the nature and limits of moral impartiality, the role of human psychology in the determination of moral duty, and the moral importance of equality. Along with providing new depth and directions to normative inquiries that add to the conceptual enrichment of the seminal issues in ethics and political philosophy, the chapters make vivid the importance of grounding claims of practical relevance in the global realities of politics and law. Applied philosophy is now being challenged to grapple with the difficult questions of justice and equality in the real-world politics of poverty, affluence, and deprivation. Whatever the outcome of the new attention to the distant as well as the near, ethics and political philosophy will never be the same.

PART I

The ethics of distance

---

© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. Introduction Deen K. Chatterjee; Part I. The Ethics of Distance: 2. Outsiders: our obligation to those beyond our borders Peter Singer; 3. Moral limits on the demands of beneficence Richard J. Arneson; 4. The new problem of distance in morality F. M. Kamm; 5. Absence and the unfond heart: why people are less giving than they might be Judith Lichtenberg; Part II. Communities and Obligations: 6. Moral closeness and world community Richard W. Miller; 7. National responsibility and international justice David Miller; Part III. The Law of Peoples: 8. Women and theories of global justice: our need for new paradigms Martha Nussbaum; 9. Human rights as foreign policy imperatives Erin Kelly; 10. Human rights and the law of peoples Charles R. Beitz; Part IV. Rights, Responsibilities and Institutional Reforms: 11. Thickening convergence: human rights and cultural diversity Henry Shue; 12. Global justice: whose obligations? Onora O'Neill; 13. 'Assisting' the global poor Thomas W. Pogge.

Editorial Reviews

"Chatterjee has edited & introduced an excellent anthology whose contributors generally call for development assistance or poverty relief for nations that cannot or will not provide for their own people. Recommended." A.S. Rosenbaum, Cleveland State University, CHOICE

"A valuable contribution to the literature of philosphy and noninterventionist international humanitarian assistance." Perspectives on Political Science

From the Publisher