Global Poverty And Individual Responsibility

Global poverty and responsibility -- Duties of beneficence -- Duties of redress -- Duties of institutional justice -- Responsibilities of affluent individuals.

This book explores whether affluent people in the developed world have stringent responsibilities to help fight poverty abroad.

Global poverty and responsibility -- Duties of beneficence -- Duties of redress -- Duties of institutional justice -- Responsibilities of affluent individuals.

This book explores the nature of moral responsibilities of affluent individuals in the developed world, addressing global poverty and arguments that philosophers have offered for having these responsibilities. The first type of argument grounds responsibilities in ability to avert serious suffering by taking on some cost. The second argument seeks to ground responsibilities in the fact that the affluent are contributing to such poverty. The authors criticise many of the claims advanced by those who seek to ground stringent responsibilities to the poor by invoking these two types of arguments. It does not follow from this that the affluent are meeting responsibilities to the poor. The book argues that while people are not ordinarily required to make large sacrifices in assisting others in severe need, they are required to incur moderate costs to do so. If the affluent fail consistently to meet standards, this fact can substantially increase the costs they require to bear to address it.

Master's Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Ethics, Ruhr-University of Bochum, language: English, abstract: This paper asks the following four questions: What is our moral responsibility for global poverty? Can historical injustices such as slavery and colonialism be linked to backward-looking responsibilities? Can the allocation of moral responsibility to rich and poor people be justified? Considering both, humanitarian and development aid, which of the two concepts is the more effective one in the face of the huge challenges of world poverty? The answer of the third question focuses immediately on the responsible actors that come into question, and the fourth on moral claims brought forward along with the practical implementation of particular claims. Having outlined the subject of the matter of this paper, it is now important to make clear the aims of it. These are twofold. First, it aims to explore in depth and to evaluate competing philosophical perspectives on the issue of moral responsibility towards the poor. As such it seeks to provide a comprehensive analysis of three important contributions to this topic. These are the ethical theories of Peter Singer, Thomas Pogge and David Miller, whose disparate viewpoints lay a good foundation for the depiction of fundamental dissimilarities. Second, my investigation seeks, on the one hand, to show that a proper allocation of moral responsibility to rich and poor people under certain conditions is possible; and on the other hand, to provide a defence of the claim that development aid is the more appropriate concept of aid for combating poverty-related issues instead of humanitarian aid in view of the adverse criticism of Singer’s theory. In the end, I shall propose points that could make development aid more effective.

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Politics - Political Theory and the History of Ideas Journal, grade: A, University of Dundee, course: Theorising Politics, language: English, abstract: The 25th Article of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights declares each human being as having the right to “a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family,” which comprises of food, clothing, housing and medical care amongst others (UN General Assembly, 1948). For over 767 million people today, or a tenth of the world’s population located primarily in the Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, those rights are being taken away, further undermining the ability to pursue other basic civil and political rights as a consequence. For long, the eradication of global poverty has been at the forefront of political discussion amongst the political philosophers and cosmopolitan internationalists of the developed nations. The gap between the rich and the poor in wealthy and yet rapidly growing societies such as the United States, Brazil or China has widened immensely in the aftermath of the global economic recession of 2008. Although the socialist revolutionary ideas portrayed in Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016 escalated populous grievances about the growing economic inequality and political lobbying, the policies of the wealthy nations fail to address the scale of global poverty within their foreign policy agenda. There are numerous reasons why the West should take responsibility for global poverty. Perhaps the most influential and challenging political philosopher on global justice and human rights, Thomas Pogge, believes that wealthy societies are to be held responsible for the global poverty due to shared history, resources and global economic order. While I agree with Thomas Pogge’s arguments that wealthy societies are to blame for the expanding global inequality and thus ought to be responsible for restoring equality, the nature of political development and social relations within each individual developing country, I believe, shall be taken into thorough consideration whilst eradicating poverty through grassroots decision-making.

In 2013, the World Bank Group announced two goals that would guide its operations worldwide. First is the eradication of chronic extreme poverty bringing the number of extremely poor people, defined as those living on less than 1.25 purchasing power parity (PPP)†“adjusted dollars a day, to less than 3 percent of the world’s population by 2030.The second is the boosting of shared prosperity, defined as promoting the growth of per capita real income of the poorest 40 percent of the population in each country. In 2015, United Nations member nations agreed in New York to a set of post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the first and foremost of which is the eradication of extreme poverty everywhere, in all its forms. Both the language and the spirit of the SDG objective reflect the growing acceptance of the idea that poverty is a multidimensional concept that reflects multiple deprivations in various aspects of well-being. That said, there is much less agreement on the best ways in which those deprivations should be measured, and on whether or how information on them should be aggregated. Monitoring Global Poverty: Report of the Commission on Global Poverty advises the World Bank on the measurement and monitoring of global poverty in two areas: What should be the interpretation of the definition of extreme poverty, set in 2015 in PPP-adjusted dollars a day per person? What choices should the Bank make regarding complementary monetary and nonmonetary poverty measures to be tracked and made available to policy makers? The World Bank plays an important role in shaping the global debate on combating poverty, and the indicators and data that the Bank collates and makes available shape opinion and actual policies in client countries, and, to a certain extent, in all countries. How we answer the above questions can therefore have a major influence on the global economy.