Resolved: Wealthy Nations Have an Obligation to Provide Development Assistance to Other

The Topic

2017 November/December Topic

Resolved: Wealthy nations have an obligation to provide development assistance to other nations.

Negative

No Moral Obligation

Difficult to Articulate Moral Theory Necessitating Obligation

DIFFICULT TO FIND A MORAL GROUNDING FOR OBLIGATIONS TO ASSIST OTHERS THAT ONE HAS NO CONNECTION WITH

Daniel Callahan, Director Hastings Institute, 1976, Lifeboat Ethics: the moral dilemmas of world hunger, ed. G. Lucas, Jr. & T. Ogletree, p. xii-xiii

But the moral problem remains. At its deepest level that problem reduces to one of moral obligation. To whom are we obligated and under what circumstances? As a basis of moral obligation, humanitarianism and benevolence are very weak. They depend almost entirely upon the goodwill of those with power or money. It is not that one does something to those one helps—it is just that one wants, out of charity or kindness to help them. But, by definition, it is a one-way relationship. As soon as people show themselves ungrateful (and that has been one of the main charges against the recipients of US aid), then the giver feels perfectly justified in stifling the original impulse of kindliness. The old phrase, “the deserving poor,” captures perfectly the dynamism—those poor who are, among other things, respectful and grateful. When the humanitarian impulse is combined with a deliberate calculation of self-interest on the part of the giver, then the stage is set for abuse.

Yet it is by no means easy to find a higher ground, at least one that will command the kind of consensus needed to make massive aid available to others. By a higher ground, I mean a theory of moral obligation toward others which places the emphasis on a duty toward those others, a duty which does not depend upon the vagaries of the way in which, at any given moment, we may feel toward those others. The problem here is an old one. It is not difficult to show that parents have obligations toward their children, or that families have obligations toward each other, or that other citizens have obligations toward their nation. In each of these cases, the basis of the obligation is that of mutual need and interdependence. But is it possible to posit duties toward those outside ones family, community, or national circle? What possible obligations could I have toward total strangers living in another part of the world?

FEW MORAL THEORIES ADEQUATE TO EXPLAIN THE SPECIFICS OF OUR OBLIGATIONS TO DISTANT OTHERS IN NEED

OnoraO’Neill, Philosophy Professor-University of Essex, 1980, Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. T. Regan, p.

It is not only Christian ethics that leaves many problems about distant famines unanswered. Other moral theories are more adequate in dealing with some of the problems, while others do best at different problems. Few of these theories are applied to the alleviation of distant miseries, or show us how to work out who should help whom, to what extent, at what point, and at what cost to themselves or others. Because of this, I shall adopt an exploratory approach and tone in this essay. I shall try both to show something about how particular moral theories can deal with some questions about famine (and not with others) and to use considerations of famine to show some of the strengths and limitations of these theories.

SINGLE MORAL PRINCIPLES TO GUIDE ACTIONS DIFFICULT – ALWAYS FRAUGHT WITH PROBLEMS

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor Philosophy-Princeton University, 2006, Cosmopolitanism: ethics in a world of strangers, p. 161-2

The larger point, of course, is that our conviction that we should save the drowning child doesn’t by itself tell us why we should do so. I have already argued that our mortal intuitions are often more secure than the principles we appeal to in explaining them. There are countless principles that would get you to save the drowning child without justifying your own immiseration. Here’s one:

“If you are the person in the best position to prevent something really awful, and it won’t cost you much to do so, do it.”

Now this principle—which I am inclined, for the moment, to think may be right—simply doesn’t have the radical consequences of the Singer principle. I’m not especially well placed to save the children that UNICEF has told me about. And even if I were, giving away most of my means would radically reduce my quality of life. Perhaps this principle suggests that Bill Gates should give millions to save poor children from dying around the world. But, come to think of it, he does that already.

This principle—I’ll call it the emergency principle—is a low-level one that I think is pretty plausible. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if some philosopher came up with a case where the emergency principle gave what I thought was the wrong answer. That’s because figuring out moral principles, as an idle glance at the history of moral philosophy will show you, is hard. I have talked often in this book about values, in part because I think it is easier to identify values than to identify exceptionless principles. One reason that life is full of hard decisions is precisely that it’s not easy to identify single principles, like the Singer principle, that aim to tell you what to do. (Even the Singer principle tells you what to do only if you can reduce all values to their contributions to the badness in the world, which is something I seriously doubt.) Another reason is that it’s often unclear what the effects will be of what we do.

NO MORAL THEORY JUSTIFIES MORAL OBLIGATION TO REDRESS GLOBAL POVERTY

Judith Lichtenberg, Philosophy Professor, University of Maryland, 2004, The Ethics of Assistance: morality and the distant needy, ed. Deen K. Chatterjee, p. 81-2

The secular philosopher who rejects Anscombe's theistic framework may have an answer to the "or else" question: or else you will be a bad person, a person below the moral minimum. But however common and tempting a reply it is (and I've made it myself many times), it is not very satisfactory. And this brings us to the second theme that can be drawn out of Anscombe's argument. Although Anscombe does not put it in precisely these terms, toexplain to someone who is not already convinced that she has a moral obligation to make substantial sacrifices in order to help the poor requires a moral theory of which that is the conclusion.

Not all moral concepts are equally theory-dependent, but the concept of moral obligation is especially so. It cries out for explanation, justification. That is why it is intuitively plausible to say, as Thomson does, that one who doesn't help when he easily could is "indecent" (or, alternatively, a jerk) — less theory-dependent ideas — while at the same time denying that he violates a moral obligation. The claim of moral obligation demands a more robust account. The most popular account is probably a contractual/libertarian one according to which positive obligations arise only from agreements, implicit or explicit.

The theistic views that Anscombe describes contain robust theories of the appropriate kind. But which secular moral theory is it that entails a strong moral obligation to assist the world's poor? Some interpretations of consequentialism or utilitarianism (such as Singer's) may imply such an obligation, but others do not. Some deontological views may, but others do not. Some virtue theories may demand significant sacrifices of the good person, but — depending on their particular conception of virtue — others do not.

So to establish that people have strong moral obligations to help the world's poor, we would have to settle on an acceptable moral theory. The search to establish one is certainly a legitimate enterprise, but it is not one that interests everyone. One may be skeptical of such theorizing because one believes it misguided in one way or another - because one does not believe that the construction and development of moral theories, as these are usually understood, is the most useful way to reflect on and understand moral matters. One may also be impatient with such theorizing because of a concern to reform our practices and a belief that theorizing of this kind does not help us in this endeavor.

Common Human Identity Doesn’t Justify Obligation

COMMON HUMAN IDENTITY DOESN’T JUSTIFY OBLIGATION TO THE NEEDS OF OTHERS

Michael Ignatieff, Professor Human Rights Policy-Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, 1984, The Needs of Strangers: An essay on privacy, solidarity and the politics of being human, p. 27-8

What is it then which binds those who have more than enough and those with less than enough in the ties of obligation? For most people, obligations are a matter of custom, habit and historical inheritance as much as a matter of explicit moral commitment. But might there not be something more than custom, habit and inheritance? Whatever the customs of a country, it would seem ‘unnatural’ for a father to deny his duty towards the needs of his children, unnatural for a daughter to refuse to give shelter to her homeless father. Beneath all these, there is nature: the natural feeling which ought to exist between father and children and more mysteriously between human beings as such.

The language of human needs is a basic way of speaking about this idea of a natural human identity. We want to know what we have in common with each other beneath the infinity of our differences. We want to know what it means to be human, and we want to know what the knowledge commits us to in terms of duty. What distinguishes the language of needs is its claim that human beings actually feel a common and shared identity in the basic fraternity of hunger, thirst, cold, exhaustion, loneliness or sexual passion. The possibility of human solidarity rests on this idea of natural human identity. A society in which strangers would feel common belonging and mutual responsibility to each other depends on trust, and trust reposes in turn on the idea that beneath difference there is identity.

Yet when one thinks about it, this is a puzzling idea. For who has ever met a pure and natural human being? We are always social beings, clothed in our skin, our class, income, our history, and as such, our obligations to each other are always based on difference. Ask me who I am responsible for, and I will tell you about my wife and child, my parents, my friends and relations, and my fellow citizens. My obligations are defined by what it means to be a citizen, a father, a husband, a son, in this culture, in this time and place. The role of pure human duty seems obscure. It is difference which seems to rule my duties, not identity.

DIFFERENCES MORE IMPORTANT THAN COMMON IDENTITY IN GIVING MEANING TO LIFE

Michael Ignatieff, Professor Human Rights Policy-Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, 1984, The Needs of Strangers: An essay on privacy, solidarity and the politics of being human, p. 29

The natural identity of need helps one to understand why the new language of universal claims—the language of universal human rights—makes so little headway against the claims of racial, tribal, and social difference. The needs we actually share we share with animals. What is common to us matters much less than what differentiates us. What makes life precious for us is difference, not identity. We do not prize our equality. We think of ourselves not as human beings first, but as sons, and daughters, fathers and mothers, tribesmen, and neighbors. It is this dense web of relations and the meanings which they give to life that satisfies the needs which really matter to us.

GROUNDING THE RATIONALE FOR OBLIGATIONS TO OTHERS IN SHARED HUMANITY INEFFECTIVE AND DANGEROUS

Michael Ignatieff, Professor Human Rights Policy-Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, 1984, The Needs of Strangers: An essay on privacy, solidarity and the politics of being human, p. 51-3

Lear thought that our social duties, like the duty of father to daughter, must be built upon a natural human duty which every human being accepts. He thought, as many of us think, that our social duties to specific persons in this time and place – our duties as fathers, sons, daughters or citizens – build up in a pyramid that rests on the solid shared ground of natural duty. That is how it ought to be. Beneath the social there ought to be the natural. Beneath the duties that tie us to individuals, there ought to be a duty that ties us to all men and women whatever their relation to us. In fact, beneath the social, the historical, there is nothing at all.

When a Jew could no longer appeal to his fellow German as a neighbor, as a friend, as a relation, as a partner, as a fellow Jew even, when at the end, naked at the barbed wire, he could only appeal to the man with the whip as a fellow human being, then it was more than too late. When men confront each other as men, as abstract universals, one with power, the other with none, then man in certain to behave as a wolf to his own kind.

To bring justice to the heath, to protect the Tom O’Bedlams hurled into no-man’s-land by war and persecution, there has arisen the doctrine of universal human rights and the struggle to make murderers and torturers respect the inviolability of human subjects. If we all have the same needs, we all have the same rights.

Yet we recognize our mutual humanity in our differences, in our individuality, in our history, in the faithful discharge of our particular culture of obligations. There is no identity we can recognize in our universality. There is no such thing as love of the human race, only the love of this person for that, in this time and not in any other.

These abstract subjects created by our century of tyranny and terror cannot be protected by abstract doctrines of universal human needs and universal human rights, and not merely because these doctrines are words, and whips are things. The problem is not to defend universality, but to give these abstract individuals the chance to become real, historical individuals again, with the social relations and the power to protect themselves. The heath must be ploughed up, put under the sovereignty of a nation armed and capable of protecting its people. The people who have no homeland must be given one; they cannot depend on the uncertain and fitful protection of a world conscience defending them as examples of the universal abstraction Man. If nations cannot feed their people, they must seize the means to achieve autarky and self-sufficiency in the satisfaction of basic need within the international economy. Woe betide any many who depends on the abstract humanity of another for his food and protection. Woe betide any person who has no state, no family, no neighborhood, no community that can stand behind to enforce his claim of need. Lear learns too late that it is power and violence that rule the heath, not obligation.

APPEALS TO COMMON IDENTITY AS HUMANS FAIL – WE ARE TOO DEPENDENT ON EMBRACING OUR DIFFERENCES

Michael Ignatieff, Professor Human Rights Policy-Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, 1984, The Needs of Strangers: An essay on privacy, solidarity and the politics of being human, p. 130-1

Yet—and with this we return to Lear, to the “poor, bare, forked animal” – it is doubtful that our sense of identity as members of a species is strong enough to overcome our sense of identity based on differences. We are the first generation to have seen our planet under the gaze of eternity, not from this mountain top or that city tower, but from an astronaut’s window, revolving mist-wrapped in the cobalt darkness of space. We are the first generation to have lived under the shared threat of ecological and nuclear catastrophe. Progress, the passage from savagery to civilization, now conveys us towards apocalypse, the end of time. The tragic history of need, of which Smith and Rousseau were the great visionaries, has finally made us one: every part of the planet is now subject to the spiraling dialectic of need and human labor, and every part of the planet is under the same threat of extinction. Yet—and this is the truth before which thinking about politics has stalled—the more evident our common needs as a species has become, the more brutal becomes the human insistence on the claims of difference. The centripetal forces of need, labor and science which are pulling us together as a species are counter-balanced by centrifugal forces, the claims of tribe, race, class, section, region, and nation, pulling us apart.

Millions of people have perished since 1945 in the wars, revolutions, and civil strife safely conducted under the umbrella of a nuclear peace, under the watching gaze of our imperial policemen. Most of this dying has been in the name of freedom, in the name of liberation from a colonial tribal, religious or racial oppressor. It is a waste of breath to press the claims of common human identity on men and women prepared to die in defense of their claims of difference. There will be no end to the dying, and no time for the claim of our common species being, until each people is safe within its borders, with a sovereignty which makes them master of their needs. Only when difference has its home, when the need for belonging in all its murderous intensity has been assuaged, can our common identity begin to find its voice.