Should ‘we’ care about ‘them’?

Global Justice and Poverty

We? Them?
We
Them
Wealth Distribution 2013

We / Them
Limpopo Refugee Camp

Them
 Basic Facts about Poverty
• Nearly half of the world’s population — more than 3 billion
people — live on less than $2.50 a day. More than 1.3 billion
live in extreme poverty (less than $1.25 a day).
• The gap between rich and poor grows and is larger now than
it has ever been in recorded history.
• More than 1 billion people lack adequate access to clean
drinking water and an estimated 400 million of these are
children. Because unclean water yields illness, roughly 443
million school days are missed every year
• In 2011, 165 million children under the age 5 were stunted
(reduced rate of growth and development) due to chronic
malnutrition.
• 870 million people worldwide do not have enough food to
eat.
• Preventable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia take the
lives of 2 million children a year who are too poor to afford
proper treatment.
• 80 percent of the world population lives on less than $10 a
day.
• Poverty and Disease:
– AIDS – 30 million dead.
– 2 billion infected with Tuberculosis. 9.2 million new cases
per year.
– 1 million deaths from Malaria a year.
• It would cost approximately $40 billion to offer basic
education, clean water and sanitation, reproductive health for
women, and basic health and nutrition to every person in
every developing country.
 Global Justice
• The idea that we have duties of justice to all human
beings based solely on their humanity alone, without
reference to nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, race,
religion, gender or other particularities.
• If justice is defined as ‘just treatment and the quality
of being fair and equitable……’
• Then global justice refers to just treatment of all
humans and the quality of being fair and equitable to
those beyond our borders.
But, Relax ‘we’ Really Don’t
Have to Care Too Much
• Justice requires a sense of national
solidarity and cultural identification.
• Justice is only about institutional
structures, if they don’t exist, justice
does not exist.
• Justice is about reciprocal
relationships where expectations
are generated.
• Justice only applies where
‘relational conditions’ exist, if this is
not the case at the global level,
justice remains an internal matter
for states.
• Duties for some assistance, but not
justice.
Why ‘We’ Have to Care

• It is a matter of happenstance where

a person is born. Determining just
treatment on the accident of birth is
arbitrary and unfair.
• There are global institutions that
greatly alter the lives of those
beyond our borders.
• Globalization creates ‘relational
conditions’ that demand social
cooperation and culpability, where
the scope of justice applies.
 Drivers of Poverty
• Profit shifting by large Int’l corporations
• Capital flight
• Large national debt loads
• Unequal market access or conditionalities
• Large scale corruption
• Disease burdens
• General lack of political will
 Preventing Known Harm
Even if you don’t buy the positive moral argument….
• Negative argument – would you knowingly want to harm
another human being?
• According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization there is enough food produced to adequately
feed the world population.
• The largest driver of poverty is unfair economic and political
structures that perpetuate inequities.
• Western lifestyles are paid for from the poverty of others.
• Is 40 billion really too much?
 Questions
• Do ‘we’ in the developed world have an
obligation to eliminate global poverty?
• If not, why not? If so, why? And what would
those obligations look like?
• What prevents us from preventing global
poverty?
• Is it worth the $40 billion cost?