Chapter 8

World Poverty and Moral Responsibility

Ser-Min Shei
Philosophy, National Chung Cheng University, Chia-Yi, Taiwan

I.

We all know that hundreds of millions of people worldwide are

chronically malnourished and barely surviving. According to a recent
estimate, the number of people who live below the World Bank’s $2/day
poverty line is about 2,800 million or 46 percent of humankind, and
annually, 18 million people die prematurely from poverty-related causes
(Pogge 2002a: 2). World poverty is not a situation intentionally brought
about by any particular agent. It is caused not by one single factor, but by
innumerably many factors, and no one knows, even if one cares to know,
whether or not their everyday economic decisions have negative effects on
world poverty, and if so, how and to what extent. But, despite its complex
origin, it does not follow that the eradication of world poverty is beyond our
reach no matter what we — humankind — collectively choose to do. On the
contrary, whether we take ourselves to have compelling reason to eradicate
world poverty will surely make a difference. If enough of us are convinced

In addition to the Oslo Symposium on Global Justice, the previous versions of this paper
were also presented at the Philosophy Seminar entitled “Poverty as a Violation of Human
Rights,” organized by UNESCO, 8–9 September, 2003, in Delhi, India, and at the Joint
Tsinghua-CUHK International Conference on Political Philosophy, entitled “Justice,
Community and Democracy,” 14–16 October, 2003, in Beijing, China. For the critical and
probing comments it received, I would like to thank David Archard, Richard Arneson,
Christian Barry, Rüdiger Bittner, Bashshar Haydar, Martin Van Hees, Hon-Lam Li, Ernest
Marie Mbonda, Gerhard Øverland, Thomas Pogge, Joseph Raz, Sanjay Reddy, Yuan-
Kang Shih, John Skorupski, Terence Tai, Andrew Williams, and Ruey-Yuan Wu.
Especially, I would like to express my gratitude to Thomas Pogge, without whose
encouragement and helpful suggestions this paper would not exist.

139
A. Follesdal and T. Pogge, (eds.), Real World Justice, 139-155.
© 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.
140 Ser-Min Shei

that we have compelling reason to eradicate world poverty, it will be

relatively easy to find an effective strategy or a scheme of coordination to
achieve it.1 But why aren’t people, especially those who are, relatively
speaking, affluent and able, mostly living in the developed states, convinced
that they have compelling reason to help eradicate world poverty?
One simple explanation for the denial of compelling reason is that most
people do not believe that they are morally responsible for the persistence of
world poverty, or even mistakenly believe, in my view, that they are not
morally responsible for the persistence of world poverty.2 The explanation is
suggested by the assumption that once people come to believe that they are
morally responsible for a bad situation, say, someone’s being harmed,
normally they will also believe that they have a duty to respond to the
situation appropriately, such as to take action to change the situation, reduce
its badness, and/or to compensate the victims (if there are any) for their loss
and suffering. And if the situation for which they think they are morally
responsible is very bad, then they tend to think that this duty gives them
compelling reason to take appropriate action.
Admittedly, the notion of moral responsibility in which this explanation
is couched needs further clarification, if we also want to show convincingly
that people are mistaken about the moral responsibility for the persistence of
world poverty. At least, we have to specify the general criteria (or grounds)
for determining
(1) who is (are) morally responsible with respect to a bad situation such as
world poverty; and
(2) how the duty to take appropriate action is to be shared among those who
are morally responsible for the bad situation.
Ability to change the current situation or to compensate the victims might
be relevant to the second question, but not to the first; so is whether one has
gained from the bad situation: those who gain nothing from a bad situation
may be morally responsible for the bad situation as in cases in which one
intentionally makes the situation worse for others, which in turn comes to

1
Admittedly, even if a person takes himself or herself to have compelling reason to help
eradicate world poverty, he or she might not take any action at all for the eradication of
world poverty, because the person might believe that what he or she does will not make a
difference for the eradication of world poverty, given what others choose to do. Hence it is
extremely important to get people to do what they take themselves to have compelling
reason to do against the thought that what they each do will make no difference to the
situation.
2
For alternative explanations, see Pogge 2002a: 3–11. He lists and discusses two causal
explanations as to why most people in the affluent Western states do not find themselves
have compelling reason to help eradicate world poverty. Pogge also considers and rejects
four “reasons” as well as what he calls explanatory nationalism as defenses for
acquiescence in world poverty.