Poverty and the Moral Significance of Contribution

Abstract

The main thesis of the article is that one's responsibility to render assistance is not affected by having contributed to the situation by causing harm. I examine ways in which contribution to need is morally significant. Although contribution is relevant with regard to certain features, such as questions of blame, compensation, and fair distribution of the cost of assistance, I argue that contribution should carry no weight when assessing our duty to assist people in severe need if we can do so at little cost. If this is true we have reason to suspect that it is redundant to know whether or not we have in fact contributed to the need of the global poor when assessing our duty to address global poverty.

Duties and Responsibilities Towards the Poor

“…In light of this, it seems reasonable to search for other ways of justifying our duties to help people in severe need. 27 One such way would be to examine the strength of our positive duties (see Satz 2005;Øverland 2005). I have tried to provide such an account, and further to ground it in an ideal of telic sufficientarianism.…”

World poverty, positive duties, and the overdemandingness objection

“…In 'Poverty and the Moral Significance of Contribution', Gerhard Overland (2005) discusses Thomas Pogge's arguments about why we might have reason to assist the global poor (Pogge, 2008). Whatever duties we might have to aid the global poor, simply because they are poor, Pogge argues, we also have more stringent responsibilities of assistance by virtue of our contributory role in global international institutions that create and sustain conditions of poverty on a large scale.…”

Thomas Pogge on Global Justice and World Poverty: A Review Essay

“…He is of the opinion that we have a duty to eradicate severe poverty in developing nations. In holding this view, he is on par with theorists such as Singer (, ), Temkin (,b), Huseby (), Gilabert (), Unger (), Shue (), and Overland (), but unlike these theorists, who rest their view on a ‘positive duty’ argument, Pogge mainly rests his view on a ‘negative duty’ argument . Our duty to eradicate global poverty is a result primarily of us having harmed the poor .…”

“…He is of the opinion that we have a duty to eradicate severe poverty in developing nations. In holding this view, he is on par with theorists such as Singer (1972, 2009), Temkin (2005a, Huseby (2008), Gilabert (2005), Unger (1996), Shue (1980), andOverland (2005), but unlike these theorists, who rest their view on a 'positive duty' argument, Pogge mainly rests his view on a 'negative duty' 4. See Cruft (2005) for a careful and insightful discussion of the distinction between negative and positive duties and the issue of how this distinction might be relevant to broader issues in global justice.…”

“…The positive duty argument to eradicate global poverty essentially involves the claim that though we might not have harmed (or are currently harming) the global poor, we nonetheless have a duty to offer them assistance because they are so much worse off than we are and because we can offer such assistance at no great cost to our own welfare. Overland is, for example, of the opinion that morality requires a contributor to harm as well as a bystander (who has not contributed to harm) to assist a person in need if they can do so at little cost to themselves (, p. 301). Add to this the highly plausible empirical premise that many well‐off people are in a position to assist a poor person at little cost to themselves and we arrive at the conclusion that many well‐off people have a positive duty to offer assistance to the global poor though they have not contributed to the harming of the global poor.…”