Three reasons why poverty ain’t going to be history just yet 
Posted By Mirko Bagaric on November 28th, 2006
As a species we are more self-interested than ethical. Until we come to grips with that and some other basal aspects of the way in which we are wired talk fests-like the G20 will do little to ameliorate the plight of mass human suffering that sees 30,000 people die daily of hunger and other preventable causes.
The central question that ethicists in generations to come will ask of our community is how is it that most of the citizens of the Western World have been so spectacularly successful at ignoring the desperate hungry cries from the developing world. What are the moral defects that accounted for this?
There are in fact three fundamental failings that are imbedded in the moral thinking of the Western World. These are so destructive that future generations will regard our moral code as simply being code for a localised etiquette that is invoked by those with loud voices – namely, the rich and influential.
The first reason is that the cries of third world deprivation have not registered on our consciousness radar. This stems from the ‘doorstep phenomenon’ – the empirical fact that proximate suffering matters more to us than anonymous, distant suffering.
We all know that at any point of time there are thousands, if not millions, of people dying in distant parts of the world from readily preventable causes. The occasional fleeting glimpse of starving children on the evening news typically evokes some sense of sympathy, guilt or responsibility. Unfortunately we are too good at escaping these feelings – however, we need to be educated that we should hold onto them. The extent of another’s suffering is not measured by our capacity to directly sense it, neither is the scope of our moral duties.
The generosity displayed by Australians following the tsunami disaster two years ago was a striking and welcome departure from our normal level of disinterest towards desperate foreigners. This, however, only serves to highlight the reality of the door-step principle. Our wallets were forced open by the media bombardment of the tsunami that pushed the tragedy into our living rooms.
The second basis upon which much of the first world deflects responsibility for preventable poverty generated deaths is the ‘acts and omissions’ doctrine. This is the principle that we are liable for only the consequences that we directly bring about, rather than the deaths and tragedies we fail to prevent. This doctrine is unsound. While morality makes very few positive demands of us, there are occasions when acting morally requires us to do more than merely refraining from certain behaviour; there are times when we must actually do something.
Morality defined exhaustively as a set of negative prohibitions fails to explain why it would be morally repugnant to decline to save the child drowning in a puddle in order to avoid getting our shoes wet, or to refuse to throw a life-belt to the person drowning beside the pier.
The situations in which morality demands performance of a positive action are infrequent. When they do arise, however, the obligations can be so clear, pronounced and unwavering that it would be implausible to postulate an account of morality which is not consistent with and explicable of such observations. As such our moral duties are not even partially circumscribed by the distinction between our acts and omissions.
We are responsible for our acts and in some situations our omissions. The circumstances in which we are liable for our omissions are demarcated by the maxim of positive duty, which prescribes that we must assist others in serious trouble, when assistance would immensely help them at no or little inconvenience to ourselves.
This maxim ties in neatly with the circumstances in which we need to assist those in other countries. It explains why we are required to make some sacrifices for other people, even in distant parts of the world, but need not be ’slaves’ to them by attending to every situation of perceived need.
It is important to note that our ‘non-neighbours’ are included in this principle by virtue of the fact that there is no logical or normative basis for ranking the interests of one person higher than another. An argument along the lines that ‘I am more important than you’ is inherently discriminatory and morally vacuous.
The last reason is the most fundamental. Contemporary moral discourse is framed in the language of rights. We like rights. They are individualising claims and give us a protective sphere. But they limit our moral horizons to ourselves and sometimes to the person immediately before us. But rights are nonsense.
Despite the dazzling veneer of rights based theories and their influence on present day moral and legal discourse, such theories are unable to provide persuasive answers to central issues such as: What is the justification for rights? How can we distinguish real from fanciful rights? Which right takes priority in the event of conflicting rights? Such intractable difficulties stem from the fact that contemporary rights theories lack a coherent foundation.
That’s why in the West we can still hold a straight face and assert that our right to keep our excess food is more important than the right to life of starving Africans.
The emptiness of rights talk explains why even in our backyard we live in a society where the life expectancy of male Aborigines is 20 years less than for other Australians; homosexuals still can’t marry one another; one’s bank account determines access to health, education and even access to roads; suspects that are held in custody until trial and then found innocent (sometimes more than a year later) receive no compensation for this egregious deprivation and we treat the suffering of animals with disregard – except of course the cute fuzzy ones we like to pat and who enjoy more luxuries than approximately half of humanity.
It is time to re-think rights, with consequences replacing them as the main moral building blocks. What matters most is maximizing flourishing, not adding to the ever increasing catalogue of rights, which can only be enjoyed by most of the world at the conversation level.
A version of this was published in The Age on 21 November 2006.