Obligations of the Wealthy

In this essay, I will argue that the claim "citizens of wealthy countries are obligated to alleviate severe global poverty, because such countries are complicit in the creation of this poverty and/or its perpetuation" is false. In the first part of the essay, I will try to show that the claim is not sound. In the second part, I will offer a natural fix to make the claim sound, and argue that even as a sound claim, it still cannot be true. After each of my arguments, I will address a potential objection.

Before we proceed, it is necessary to note that the word “obligated” expresses a type of negative duty distinct from what we understand to be duty of beneficence. This claim is strong in the sense that it would deem the citizens of state A to be doing wrong if they are not actively relieving poverty, since relieving poverty is their obligation. Such “obligation” which requires certain self-sacrificing actions [1]is different from regular responsibility.

The first reason to reject the claim is that it is not sound, i.e. the conclusion does not follow from the premise. For the claim to be sound, we need to assume that if state A is complicit in the creation of this poverty and/or its perpetuation, then the citizens of state A are obligated to alleviate severe global poverty. Call this the Central Inferential Rule. I think the Central Inferential Rule should be doubted, because most citizens of state A have neither consented nor chosen to be a citizen of state A. They are merely born into it, and it has already been rich by the time they were born. They neither participated, nor endorse the historical injustice. Why should someone owe others a negative duty for something that they have completely no control over?

I realize that this is an old argument, so I will anticipate an objection that is very specific to this claim[2]: one may say that although the citizens did not choose to be born into state A, they may have chosen the way things are done in state A.

To respond to this objection properly, let us temporarily ignore states such as China where citizens really have not chosen the way things are done, and states such as the U.S. where lobbyists and big cooperation have a disproportional power on the way things are done. Instead, let us say that in democratic state A, things are done based on the voting of its citizens and that only. Why may the citizens still be exempt from a negative duty towards the poor in this system? I think it is due to the nature of the voting decision that they make. A citizen makes a complex, rational, optimal decision when voting. This optimal is for the best of him, for the best of its offspring, and even perhaps for the best of the environment. If we count such a decision as violating one’s certain negative duty, what other decision does one have to turn to in order to not violate it? Presumably one would have to turn to a suboptimal decision that is either not-as-good for oneself, or not-as-good for one’s offspring, or not-as-good for the environment, etc. So, by making such a decision and blatantly ignoring a feasible alternative, is one not also violating negative duty towards another different entity, such as oneself, one’s offspring, or the environment?

My non-soundness objection to the claim can be fixed by changing the claim to that wealthy countries rather than its citizens are obligated to alleviate severe global poverty, because they are complicit in the creation of this poverty and/or its perpetuation. But even after the fix, I still do not think the claim is true. I consider the strongest defense of the improved claim to be an appeal to past injustice. Let us leave rectification aside for the sake of this essay. Defender of the claim can say that even if we do not count rectification, the wealth of the rich states can still be seen as an aftermath of the past wrong[3]. It may seem that because rich countries created the global inequality, perpetuated it and benefitted from it, they owe the poor a negative duty to alleviate their poverty right now. In other words, we intuitively want to accuse the rich state of currently benefiting from past harm it has caused, and incurring on itself a negative duty for its past wrongdoing.

In attempting to reject this line of reasoning, I claim that rich states can only stay rich because they possess certain profit-making qualities, such as innovation, foreign investments, immigration of elites, etc. Technological industry giants such as Facebook and Google bring a lot of profit into the U.S., but I do not see any ground for accusing these companies of either being a result of ongoingly harming the poor states or a cause of ongoing harm. Admittedly, the profit-making qualities that rich states possess can be said to be a benefit from past harm done but is no longer contributing to ongoing harm. Benefitting from past harm should not create a negative duty. To use Anwander’s example, if benefiting from past injustice incurs a negative duty, then every time we get an X-ray, we would be owing more to the citizens of Hiroshima bombing (Anwander, 40). In other words, I can grant that profit-making qualities such as innovation would perhaps have never happened had the innovative states already been rich, but innovation itself neither causes harm nor perpetuates it. Without appealing to rectification of historical wrong, I do not see how we can say that what the rich states currently owns does not belong rightfully to themselves. To summarize, such profit-making qualities cannot incur negative duties because of their harmless nature despite their harmful origin. Rich states are therefore not obligated to give away what they have made through legitimate means, i.e. profit-making qualities.

Here, I expect an objection from Pogge that it is not about how the rich states are making money specifically, but rather that the current global institutional order that the rich puts into place is unjust. It is unjust because, there exists alternative methods of allocating resource that would alleviate poverty. Hence by not committing to those methods, we are violating a negative duty still. One alternative implementation that he offers is Global Resource Dividend (GRD), which requires that “rich countries share a small part of any resource they decide to use or sell” (Pogge, 66). To this, I respond that if we can simply snap our fingers to change the global order to one where no one suffers from poverty, we would indeed to violating a negative duty to not do so. But changing global institutional order is not that easy, and we cannot ignore the risks and costs associated with it and call it a snap-of-fingers. The GRD proposed by Pogge may not be as satisfying as it sounds if we put it to implementation on a state level. Where are we going to take out the dividend that Pogge proposed? To take it out of a land is to violate the right of the landowner. To take it out of the profit of companies such as Google, Facebook, and everyone else who is making honest profit with the profit-making qualities we discussed in the last paragraph is also to chip away something that someone rightfully owns because of their profit-making qualities. Alternatively, the state can boldly implement GRD with a slight violation of property rights, in the name of fulfilling an obligation. The state can then potentially drive disappointed property owners, innovators, and investors out of the country and stagger the economy. These are the type of risks and costs which I think Pogge is not considering when proposing alternative global institutional orders. Since an alternative global order cannot be as readily and easily put into place as one would expect, Pogge has yet to convince us that rich states who have not put such a global order in place have any negative duties towards the poor states.

To conclude, I have argued that the claim is not true, because it is not sound. And even if we fix it to be sound, it is still unclear that the rich countries who make profits legitimately through profit-making-qualities has an obligation to alleviate poverty.

Reference

Anwander, Norbert. “Contributing and Benefiting: Two Grounds for Duties to the Victims of Injustice.” Ethics & International Affairs, January 19, 2005, 39–45.

Pogge, Thomas W. “Eradicating Systemic Poverty: Brief for a Global Resources Dividend.” Journal of Human Development 2, no. 1 (2001): 59–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649880120050246.

1. [1] By “self-sacrificing actions”, I meant any action which is not only burdensome to carry out, but also reduces the level of comfort of the agent’s life. [2] This objection can be seen as an extension of what Pogge argues in Eradicating System Poverty[2]. Pogge does not specify duties of each citizen, he only argues that the mere fact that state A does things this way has given it a negative duty. But we can infer that the people responsible for putting the system in place are who Pogge would point to as responsible for the poverty. [3] By past wrong, I am referring to colonialism and everything rich countries have done unfairly in the past, including perhaps unfair trade agreement, or excessive GHG emissions, etc. In this essay, I am not approaching the topic with rectification. Another way to think of the following discussion is assuming proper rectification has happened, but the rich is still richer than the poor, would we then still expect the rich to alleviate the poor? The intuition may say that we are, because we are currently benefitting from the past harm still.