World poverty
World poverty one of the most important moral issues of our age (the only true competitors are global warming and risks of human extinction). However, you wouldn't know this from reading the ethics literature or the opinion pages of the newspapers. The reason for this seems to be that world poverty is not the most exciting or philosophically difficult moral issue of our age, and those are the issues that produce the most articles. This is an understandable state of affairs, but an deeply unhappy one.
Moral philosophers tend to take an understated role: they gently explain the philosophical problems behind certain ethical approaches, or warn people about the ethical complexities of new technologies (often related to reproduction). I imagine that most moral philosophers are aware that the rich countries' inaction on poverty is an enormously important moral failing, but choose not to write about it because they are not so interested in the related philosophical issues, and because its badness is so obvious. However, this inaction on behalf of philosophers makes it easier for the rich countries to turn a blind eye to the plight of the world's poor.
Peter Singer is the most prominent philosopher to buck this trend. His 1971 paper, Famine Affluence and Morality, highlighted the urgency of the issue and showed how it could be philosophically interesting as well. A small but steady stream of papers by other authors has followed, however there is in general far too little focus on such an important topic. We should not ignore such a key issue of our age, but instead look more deeply at the philosophical issues involved (collective action, the (ir)relevance of distance, messy causal chains, uncertainty of effects), all of which are very important to ethics more generally. We must also make it perfectly clear to the public and the politicians that despite small disagreements on the exact nature of the underlying issues, there is a general consensus amongst those who study ethics that inaction on extreme poverty really is one of the great moral failings of our age.
I look forward to playing my part in this challenging task, both through helping to organize academics into a unified front and through the publishing academic and popular articles on the problems of world poverty.
Ought I to forgo some luxury whenever I can thereby enable someone else's life to be saved?
| I was asked to write a paper on this topic as part of the assessment for the Bachelor of Philosophy degree at Oxford, and this was my submission. It is not as polished as I would like (I only had two weeks in which to write it), but I think that it introduces the topic nicely and provides some good counterarguments to those who think that the failures of our peers diminish our own responsibilities. |