Week 5: Global Poverty and Charitable Donations Felix Pinkert, - - PDF document

Week 5: Global Poverty and Charitable Donations

Felix Pinkert, F.Pinkert@warwick.ac.uk PH212: Applied Ethics University of Warwick 1 Introduction

1.1 Global poverty

• In 2012, 896 million people lived on less than USD 1.90 a day, and 2.1 billion people
• n less than USD 3.10 a day in 2012. (World Bank)
• Millennium development report:

– 795 million people are undernourished. – 2.4 billion people lack access to improved sanitation facilities – 946 million people still practise open defecation.

2 Duties of beneficence

2.1 Peter Singer and The Drowning Child

2.1.1 The Drowning Child The Drowning Child1 2.1.2 What we ought to do in The Drowning Child

• Intuitively, in The Drowning Child, we ought to rescue the child even at substantial

financial cost to ourselves, and not doing so would be seriously wrong. – Ruining one’s new smartphone, computer, fancy shoes, juwellery, etc. is in- tuitively not a morally significant loss that justifies not rescuing the drowning child.

• The moral truth behind this intuition is the Principle of Assistance.

– In other words, the Principle of Assistance identifies those facts about The Drowning Child that explain why we there have a duty to help. – When those same reasons are present in another case, likewise a duty should

• follow. The Principle makes this generalisation explicit.

1Singer,

“Famine, Affluence, and Morality”, Singer, The Life You Can Save, Singer, “Reconsidering the Famine Relief Argument”.

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2.1.3 Peter Singer’s (weak) Principle of Assistance

• Peter Singer’s principle of assistance If

– something bad is about to happen, and – you can prevent it from happening, and – you can do so without thereby sacrificing anything of ∗ any moral importance (weak version), ∗ comparable moral importance (strong version) then – you morally ought to prevent that bad event.

• what singer advocates

– To be more convincing, Singer advocates the weak principle, though he believes in the strong one. 2.1.4 Singer’s principle of assistance and global poverty

• We spend a lot of money on things that we can be required to sacrifice in The

Drowning Child.

• These things thus have no moral significance (and a forteriori no comparable moral

significance).

• The cost of buying these things in the first place is enough to enable a charity to

improve and save lives elsewhere.

• The same reasoning and the principle of assistance applies: You ought to not buy

these things in the first place, and instead donate the money to charity.

• Conclusion: Giving substantial amounts of money to charity is thus not

“charity” (i.e. morally good, nice, optional behaviour), but a stringent moral duty, and we act wrongly by not giving.

2.2 Common-sense morality and the demands of beneficence

2.2.1 The Charity Appeal

• You consider spending GBP 300 on a new phone.
• You receive an email informing you that for GBP 300, an effective charity can save

a life.

• You donate the GBP 300 and do not buy a new phone.
• You consider spending GBP 300 on a holiday trip.
• You receive an email. . .
• . . .

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2.2.2 How much ought we to give then?

• Contrary to the Drowning Child case, you continually have the opportunity to give

to charity instead of spending money on your own projects.

• Singer’s principle of assistance implies that you ought to donate up to the point

where you cannot give more without sacrificing – something of moral significance (weak). – something of comparable moral significance (strong): the point of equal marginal utility of money, i.e. where the amount of good you can do per unit

• f money donated equals the amount of good you can do by spending it on

yourself.

• On the weak principle, conveniences and amenities must go, on the strong principle,

even more. 2.2.3 Demandingness

• Demandingness Intuition: We are not required to forgo all inessential amenities and

give the money to life-saving charities. – Giving something is required, but giving even more after giving e.g. 10% of your income is supererogatory (i.e. even better, but not morally required: beyond the call of duty). – cf. The Demandingness Objection to Consequentialism: Consequentialism im- plies that we ought to make these sacrifices, but living ethically is not that demanding.

• The Demandingness Intuition inconsistent with the conjunction of:

– Singer’s Principle of Assistance. – The claim that suffering and death due to poverty are bad. – The claim that you can prevent some of these bad things by giving money to charity. – The claim that many things on which we spend money are of no moral signifi- cance. 2.2.4 Resolving the inconsistency

• Singer’s aim: give up the Demandingness Intuition.
• Badness of suffering and death: very hard to deny.
• Ability to prevent some of that badness by giving to charity: hard to deny (see

Effective Altruism below).

• Moral insignificance of many of our purchases?
• What about the Principle of Assistance?

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2.2.5 Moral significance and insignificance

• We spend money on

– essentials: food, clothing, housing, energy, leisure and vacation. – participating in the broader culture you live in, more abstractly: Books, music, film, theatre, news. – engaging in personal relationships as they are lived in your society: Going out for coffee or drinks, having a computer and mobile phone, traveling to see friends, doing sports. – providing for our dependents.

• If you have to sacrifice any of these things altogether, that will be a morally significant

sacrifice in your life, though often not comparable to the badness you can thereby prevent.

• So does the weak principle require any sacrifice at all? Does the fact that we care

and purchase something not show that it is significant to us?

• Response: Often there is a lot of leeway in how we get these goods, and going for

the less prefered way is not a morally significant sacrifice. – e.g. getting a used rather than a new car, computer, phone; taking cheaper holidays; living in a smaller house.

• Are these differences in what quality of the goods we get morally significant?

– Richard Miller thinks so. – Maybe Singer can’t get his conclusion with the weak Principle of Assistance, and needs a stronger principle: ∗ “serious moral significance” ∗ “not sacrificing living a worthwhile life” 2.2.6 Changing the Principle of Assistance

• Which are the reasons why we ought to assist The Drowning Child?
• Necessary factors:

– Something bad is about to happen. – You can prevent it. – Preventing it doesn’t sacrifice anything of moral significance.

• These factors might not be sufficient, and might not provide the full explanation for
• ur duties in The Drowning Child.

– Identify other factors that are relevant in The Drowning Child but missing in The Charity Appeal case. – Including these factors into the Principle of Assistance allows us to say that you

• ught to rescue The Drowning Child, but need not give all that much to charity.

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2.2.7 Candidates for relevant differences

• What might explain why you have a duty to help in the Drowning Child, but only

at most a very limited duty to help in The Charity Appeal? – Proximity. – Absence of other potential contributors, hence absence of fairness considera- tions. – Absence of people who are responsible for the impeding bad event. – Exceptional occurrence of the rescue situation.

• How to test whether the identified factor really makes a difference:

– Change the drowning child to exclude this factor. – What ought we intuitively to do then? – If we still ought to help, then this factor doesn’t help to drive a wedge between

• ur judgment in The Drowning Child and The Charity Appeal.

2.2.8 An example candidate difference

• Hypothesis: In the drowning child, proximity plays an important role in explaining
• ur obligations.

– Motivation: Since most poor people are distant, proximity is not given with regard to charity donations, and our duties of assistance do not extend that far.

• Test: Change the drowning child example by removing proximity

– Your hobby is to operate a remote controlled planes far away. – From your plane’s camera, you see a child about to drown. – You can save the child by calling the local police, but this will distract you from your flying and will make the plane crash.

• Intuition: You still ought to save the child, even though it is far away.
• So proximity is not morally relevant.
• “Rinse and repeat”: Check new hypothesis.

2.2.9 Note: Consequentialism and demandingness

• Singer’s argument explicitly does not rely on consequentialism.

– Act consequentialism: You ought to perform the act with the best consequences.

• Contrast Singer’s principle:

– The duty is not about producing best consequences, but only about preventing bads. – The duty only holds when preventing the bad does not incur a morally significant sacrifice.

• We would expect act consequentialism to be much more demanding still then Singer’s

principle. But Singer’s principle gets him the conclusion he wants, and does so with a much simpler and more broadly accepted premise than having to assume consequentialism. 5

• There is a large literature on the demands of consequentialism, what to make of

them, and how to possibly avoid them. For an extensive discussion of the Demandingness Objection and Consequentialist re- sponses, see Mulgan, Demands.

• Brad Hooker’s Rule Consequentialism: see Mulgan, “Rule Consequentialism and Famine”,

Hooker, Ideal Code.

• Donald Regan’s Co-Operative Consequentialism: see Regan, Utilitarianism and Co-Operation.
• Liam Murphy’s Fairness-constrained Consequentialism : see Murphy, Moral Demands in Nonideal Theo

a shorter, earlier version: Murphy, “The Demands of Beneficence”.

• Michael Slote’s Satisficing Consequentialism: see Slote, “Satisficing Consequentialism”.
• Scalar Consequentialism, see Mulgan, Demands, ch. 5.
• Samuel Scheffler’s Hybrid Consequentialism / agent-prerogatives.
• Tim Mulgan’s Combined Consequentialism.
• Consequentialism about reasons, and wrongness relativism, see McElwee, “Impartial Reasons, Moral De

2.2.10 Is the demandingness debate hypocritical? mulganize, v. to soften up excessively demanding moral theories. “I foolishly bought a brand of consequentialism from a wandering petersinger and it looked as though it would force me to sell all I had to give to the poor. But now I’ve had it mulganized it allows me to eat out at expensive restaurants and to make frequent trips to the opera.”2 2.2.11 Reasons to be suspicious of the debate

• Where does the Demandingness Intuition come from?
• Clearly the well-off people debating the demands of morality have an interest in

those demands being moderate. Are we just trying to rationalize and justify our selfishness?

• The Moral Extremist response: The Demandingness Intuition is mistaken, and moral-

ity really is that demanding. 2.2.12 Reasons to still be worried about demandingness

• But consider: Affluent already gives 20% of her income to an effective aid charity and

volunteers two nights a week in a charity that raises more money and that lobbies for fairer trade regimes (cf. Mulgan, “Rule Consequentialism and Famine”). Affluent considers spending GBP 300 on a nice weekend away when she receives an email from an effective charity informing her of all the good she can do with a donation of GBP 300.

• Does Affluent really act wrongly if she spends the GBP 300 on herself? Is that act

tantamount to failing to rescue The Drowning Child?

• If not, then there is something to the Demandingness Intuition.

2http://www.otago.ac.nz/philosophy/dept/history.html

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2.3 Effective altruism, making a difference, and career choice

2.3.1 Does helping really help?

• Isn’t development aid and charity problematic because it

– fosters dependency, – feeds corruption, – hampers independent economic development, – is a means to exercise power over recipients.

• Response:

– The argument so far only establishes that if you can prevent something bad by your donations, you ought to do so. – Some charitable causes are going to be better ways to do good than others. If the above concerns hold, the argument then directs you to give differently. 2.3.2 Efficiency of charitable donations Efficiency of charitable donations3

• Traditionally, charities advertise their efficiency by quoting a ratio between overhead

and operating expenses, e.g. “We only spend 5% of our budget on fundraising and management.”

• Problem: This seems irrelevant. When buying a car, you are not interested in the

budget of the car maker, but in what you get for the money.

• Alternative: Measure how much welfare benefit is generated for every pound you

give.

• Compare different interventions by measuring QALYs (quality-adjusted life years)

generated per GBP of your donations. 2.3.3 What makes a charity an efficient place to give to?

• Core determinant of charity efficiency: What kind of problem do they tackle? The

charities to which it is most efficient to give tackle problems – with high impact on many people, – which are tractable, and – for which solutions are presently neglected and underfunded.

• It is also important that the specific charities still have room for further funding.
• Examples: Against Malaria Foundation, Schistomiasis Control Initiative (deworm-

ing), Deworm the World, Project Healthy Children (micronutrients).

• Quantitative comparison works best for medical interventions. Other charities and

causes are harder to compare, e.g. – medical research,

3www.givewell.org, www.povertyactionlab.org.

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– political campaigning, – reducing existential risk (risks that might wipe out all of humanity).

• Effective altruism is not about endorsing particular causes, but about using effec-

tiveness measures in picking causes and charities within those causes.

• Check www.givingwhatwecan.org for measurement methodology.

2.3.4 A duty to give most effectively? A duty to give most effectively?4

• Is it really a duty to give to the most effective charity? What about the causes and

charities about which I already care?

• Claim: Even if giving amount X is optional, if you give X, then you are morally

required to give it to the charity that will do the most good with it.

• Core idea:

– Once you have decided to incur the cost of giving, giving to the most effective cause does a lot of extra good at no significant cost to yourself. – Not giving more effectively gratuitously, i.e. for no good reason, fails to prevent a lot of harm.

• Key to how much discretion you have is what counts as a good reason:

– personal history? – proximity of the cause? – just plain caring more? 2.3.5 A thought experiment about effective helping

• Pummer’s thought experiment:

– You heed a distress call from two adjacent lakes and go out of your way to get there, which you are not required to do, as it is very dangerous. – In one lake, one person drowns, in the other lake, ten. – You can only push the single lifeboat into one of the lakes.

• If you fail to rescue the ten, you gratuitously fail to avoid worse outcomes.

2.3.6 Making a difference with your career Making a difference with your career5

• Do you make a difference for the better if you work for an effective charity?

– You “do good”. – But had you not taken the job, another enthusiastic person would have taken it.

4Theron Pummer: “Whether and Where to Give” (forthcoming in Philanthropy and Philosophy, edited

by Paul Woodruff, Oxford University Press 2016).

5MacAskill, “Replaceability, Career Choice, and Making a Difference”

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– The difference you make is the difference between the good you do in the job and the good the other person would have done.

• Do you make a difference for the better if you become an investment banker and

donate 10% of your income to an effective charity? – Had you not taken the job, the next most suitable candidate probably wouldn’t have been as generous. – The difference you make is the difference that a top effective charity can do with the extra money that is donated through you working in investment banking. 2.3.7 Why talk of duties?

• Isn’t all this talk of obligation and wrongdoing a bit grim and negative?
• Common move to be more appealing: distinguish moral obligation and wrongness

from what you have most reason to do. – cf. McElwee on relativism of blame: What you morally ought to do on pain of being blameworthy depends on what is considered normal in your society. But you may well have most reason to go far beyond that social norm. – One way to re-read Pummer’s argument is that if you set yourself the goal of helping, then effectiveness becomes a rational imperative.

• Effective altruism then

– encourages you to be more altruistic, i.e. to care more about helping others, and – encourages you to be more rational about how to do that, and to achieve your altruistic goal most effectively.

• The effectiveness considerations feed into the motivation to help in the first place:

The difference you can make by giving effectively or picking a high-impact career is tremendous and more than you ever imagined in terms of doing good in the world. 2.3.8 Effective altruism at Warwick Effective Altruism Society Warwick

• Get involved with our Big Match campaign!
• Socials each week
• Talks, events, discussions.
• Access to research internships
• Small society with elections soon
• Join on the SU for free
• Join the open facebook group
• Like the facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismWarwic<https://www.faceb

com/EffectiveAltruismWarwick?fref=ts>k

• Visit out website: http://eawarwick.org/

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3 Negative duties not to harm

3.1 Is beneficence the right category? Or: Who put the child in the pond?

• The beneficence debate is couched in terms of preventing a bad that otherwise will

“occur”.

• The categories are categories of doing good, making a difference, having most reason.

Sometimes, talk of duty might even be replaced by motivational talk of having the great opportunity to do so much good.

• The debate seems to overlook that the bad of poverty is an injustice to which the

wealthy contribute significantly.

• Helping the poor is then not just a matter of doing good, but is, morally more

urgently, a matter of stopping to harm / compensating for harm.

• Thomas Pogge: Even if you had no duties of beneficence, you still ought to do a lot

to help the global poor.

3.2 Pogge’s main claims

3.2.1 Perfect and imperfect duties

• Duties of beneficence intuitively are imperfect and positive duties: You ought to help

sometimes, it’s wrong never to help, but you have discretion over when and how much to help.

• The Demandingness Objection can be read as objecting that Consequentialism (and

Singer’s Principle) fails to see that duties of beneficence are imperfect duties.

• Thomas Pogge (Pogge, “Real World Justice”):

– Whether or not we have imperfect positive duties to help, we definitely have perfect negative duties to not harm. – We also have “intermediate” duties to avert future harms that would otherwise be caused by our past conduct. – Perfect negative duties are more stringent than positive imperfect duties with regard to the same stakes, e.g. the duty to give to someone in poverty vs. the duty to not steal from them. 3.2.2 How we actively harm the poor

• Citizens of high-income countries have violated and keep violating these duties to not

harm and avert future harm, and are implicated in the causal mechanisms behind global poverty. – We design, implement, and enforce the global economic order which foreseeably creates extreme poverty. – We benefit from these institutions.

• We thus have stringent duties to

– reform these institutions. – mitigate the harm caused by them. 10

3.2.3 The global instutitional order and harm

• The global institutional order

– allows for and advances bad governance in poor countries: borrowing and re- source privilege go to the persons who can excercise most force in a country (cf. Leif Wenar on the resource curse). – facilitates harmful economic activity and enforces harmful economic arrange- ments: ∗ e.g. exporting EU subsidised agricultural goods to developing countries, import tariffs for goods from those countries. ∗ bargaining for lowest possible work and environmental standards.

3.3 Pogges’ argument why what we do constitutes harm

3.3.1 Step 1: Radical inequality

• 1. The worse-off are badly off in absolute terms.
• 2. The worse-off are very badly off in relative terms.
• 3. The worse-off have no way to significantly improve their position.
• 4. The inequality pervades all aspects of life.
• 5. The inequality is avoidable without the better-off becoming badly-off in absolute

terms. 3.3.2 Step 2a: Historical injustice

• Radical inequality has come about as a result of wrongdoing in the past, especially

colonialism.

• The well-off are not entitled to advantages that arise from historic wrongdoing.
• Upholding radical inequality is a harm and wrongs the poor.

3.3.3 Step 2b: Alternative histories and rational agreement

• Radical inequality might have come about even without colonialism.
• But radical inequality is justified only if people could have rationally agreed to the

rules of exchange and other economic processes involved.

• Whether such rational agreement can be assumed depends on the baseline “state of

nature”: – Locke: even a day-labourer in England is supposedly doing better than a mem- ber of the elite in the Americas: rational for him to agree to the processes leading to his situation. – Present-day: Where people are pushed below their proportional share in the world’s resources, such rational agreement cannot be assumed. 11

3.3.4 Step 2c: Alternative institutional orders

• The present institutional order is unjust because there are feasible alternative orders

that provide greater security for human rights.

• Upholding the present institutional order avoidably imposes greater insecurity of

human rights, and hence greater injustice, on people, and thereby harms them.

• Key moves:

– On the national level, institutional arrangements which avoidably cause radical inequality are unjust. – This demand of justice applies to the international level as well. – On the international level, alternative institutional arrangements that do not cause radical inequality are feasible. 3.3.5 Suggestions for a better instutitional order

• The Global Resource Divident: 1% of the value of natural resources that are eco-

nomically used should be used for the benefit of the worst-off who otherwise would have less than their proportional share in the world’s resources.

• Other suggestions:

– Leif Wenar on the resource privilege: reshape international law and property rights for natural resources: Only allow resource trade, and enforce resulting property titles, under terms advantageous to the citizens of the country from which the resources are bought. – Drop import tariffs, remove those obstacles to competition that harm the worst-

• f.

– . . .

3.4 Global justice and individual ethics

3.4.1 But I am not harming the poor!

• Cf. last week on consumer ethics: the relationship between the harm caused by “the

wealthy” and an individual moderately well-off person in a wealthy country is not straightforward.

• You might not make a difference to what your country, some company, or the overall

economy does.

• Many harms have been brought about by previous generations of people in now

wealthy countries. – Are you responsible for unjust benefits bestowed upon you by your ancestors? – Are you responsible for unjust benefits you get from a country’s past wrongdoing if you or your family are not even from that country? 12

3.4.2 Benefiting from injustice, complicity, and activism

• Again the notion of complicity may help:

– Benefiting from injustice makes you complicit and have a stake in the injustice even if you don’t make a difference to it. – You can avoid complicity by disgorging the unjust benefits.

• By helping the poor, you acknowledge that the current distribution of wealth and
• pportunity is unjust, and acquire a stake in moving to a more just world.
• Your contributions can then also back up political activism and cultural change.

3.4.3 Back to effectiveness

• The “Effective” in “Effective Altruism” can apply irrespective of the grounds of your

duties.

• If you want to remedy harms caused by your country in the past, effectiveness research

can tell you how to most effectively do it!

4 appendix starts here

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