On Helping One's Neighbor: Severe Poverty and the Religious Ethics of Obligation

Exploring what he calls 'the moral horror that is severe poverty,' Bharat Ranganathan develops a demanding account of the obligations that affluent people have to assist severely impoverished people. He argues that this is an immediate ethical as much as a social or structural imperative. Noting that developmental economists and moral and political philosophers have focused on wealth inequalities in increasingly sophisticated ways, Ranganathan observes that – within religious ethics – norma...