The Cause of Preventable World Suffering – Human Rights: All Show, No Go 
Posted By Mirko Bagaric on July 8th, 2005
Much of the humanity lives in conditions of unthinkable (by Western standards) deprivation. More than 2 billion people live on less than $2 a day. The most recent annual United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation report notes that present levels of hunger cause the death of more than five million children a year. In more comprehensible figures, this equates to more than 13,000 daily deaths from hunger. The situation is not improving. The number of chronically hungry people has hardly changed since the $800 million or so recorded approximately a decade ago. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was correct when several days after the tsunami he stated that there is a tsunami scale tragedy in Africa every week.
The Australian response to this on-gong international crisis, depending on what one believes is appropriate, ranges from woefully inadequate to modest. There is a relatively well established international Convention that richer countries will contribute a portion of their wealth to poorer countries. The target which has been set by the United Nations is 0.7% of gross national income. This target is currently met (and in some cases exceeded) by several countries: Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and Luxembourg. It is not accidental that across a range of other social measures these countries are the most progressive in the world. How does Australia fare against the 0.7% target? Not very well. We punch well below our weight division in this domain, giving a measly 0.28% of our per capita gross national income to the developing, and largely hungry, world. Still, we are not as stingy as our closest ally, the United States which contributes 0.14%.
The ‘landmark’ one off decision by the Group of Eight industrialized nations to forgive approximately $50 billion of debt from the 18 poorest countries announced on 11 June is good start. In relative terms, however, the sum is trifling compared to the $2.6 billion spent daily on military activities.
The central question that ethicists in generations to come will come to ask of our community 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 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. The media bombardment of the tsunami tragedy into our living rooms forced open our wallets. And yet, not even six months later, with the media’s attention once again focused on our local ‘dramas’, we find some people even threatening to claw back their funding because Schapelle was apparently mistreated.
The second basis upon which much of the first world can and does (impliedly) deflect 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 for Bill Gates to refuse to give his loose change to the starving peasant whose path he crosses, or why it would be wrong 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. They are simply an illustration of the fact that as a species we seem to be more greedy than smart or kind.
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.
This explains why even in our backyard we live in a society where male Aborigines have a lower life expectancy than Sudanese; 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 as our 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.
Professor Mirko Bagaric, Head of Deakin Law School
This article is a summary of a paper, ‘Human rights, all show, no go’ to be published shortly in the Journal of Human Rights. A shortened version of the above extract appeared in the Herald Sun (Melbourne) on 17 June 2005.