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forum 58

Who’s responsible?

poverty & the duty of assistance

TP M

4th quarter 2006

David Miller on the need to distinguish two types of responsibility

Who is responsible for global poverty? My question is deliberately ambiguous: if we ask “who is responsible for global poverty?”, we might be asking who is responsible for creating global poverty. I call this form of backward-looking responsibility “outcome responsibility”. However our question might also be interpreted to mean “who is responsible for getting rid of global poverty, now and in the future?” Here then we are looking forward and aiming to pin responsibility on the agent or agents who we think should carry the obligation to tackle poverty by pursuing policies with that aim from now on. I call this form of responsibility “remedial responsibility”. Of course the two forms of responsibility may well be linked, but sometimes this linkage can’t or

David Miller is professor of political theory at Oxford University and author of The Principles of Social Justice (Harvard University Press)

shouldn’t be made, and then we need to keep the distinction between the two forms of responsibility clear in our minds. In thinking about global poverty, one big issue is how far our judgements about remedial responsibility should track our judgements about outcome responsibility. Judgements of both kinds are at least partly value judgements. But the sense in which attributions of outcome responsibility imply moral judgement needs a little more clarifi cation. Obviously they presuppose empirical judgements about causation: you can’t be outcome responsible for a state of affairs unless you played some causal role in bringing that state of affairs about. But they also involve selection from among the causal antecedents. Consider a car crash involving two cars on a roundabout. In a causal sense, both must be part-responsible: if either driver had acted differently, the crash would not have occurred. But when we ask which driver was outcome-responsible for the accident, we are asking who the accident was down to, so to speak: who was driving in such a way that responsibility ought to be attributed to them – driving too fast, or driving without paying due care and attention to other cars, for example. This might make it sound as though outcome responsibility is another name for moral responsibility, in the sense that entails blame and punishment. But that isn’t so. The driver who was outcome responsible for the accident might have been driving fast in an effort to get an injured child to hospital, in which case no blame may attach to him, provided he wasn’t being completely reckless. These two concepts of responsibility are useful for examining two influential, but contrasting, attempts to answer my initial question by showing that responsibility for global poverty falls straightforwardly on the citizens of rich, developed societies. Peter Singer begins with the case of someone walking past a shallow pond in which a child is drowning. He observes that the passer-by has a duty to rescue the child even at some costs to himself, such as getting his clothes wet, and extracts from this the general principle that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” He then points out that this principle applies directly to the position of those in rich countries who could contribute money to save the lives of those in the developing world threatened by starvation or disease, and concludes that we have a moral obligation to give, up to the point at which further giving would take us or our dependants below the welfare level of the world’s poor. I’m assuming that pretty much everyone would agree with Singer that the passer-by has a remedial responsibility to rescue the drowning child, so I want to focus on why it provides a very bad analogy for thinking about responsibility for global poverty. I think it leads us astray in three ways at least: First, in the drowning child example, there is just one child struggling in the pond, and just one passer-by who is able to pull the child out. But suppose we were to complicate the example a bit, by having several children in the pond, some easier to rescue than others, some apparently more likely than others to make it to the edge by themselves. And suppose we introduce not just one passer-by but several people, some physically stronger than others,

some wearing smart suits and others wearing old jeans and so forth, then a number of questions not relevant to the original example make their appearance. Which child should be rescued first? Should we try to grab as many children as we can, or should we concentrate on those who seem most in danger of imminent death? And whose responsibility is it to carry out the rescues? How are the obligations to be assigned? These are just the kinds of questions that we need to ask if the pond case is to be of any help in thinking about global poverty. Questions about priorities, and about the assignment of responsibility, both absent from Singer’s original example, always loom large. Second, there are some background assumptions we would naturally make when thinking about the child in the pond. One is that it is a rare, one-off event. Another is that once the child is pulled out of the water, she will be returned to her parents and, let us suppose, live happily ever after. For the price of cleaning or drying my clothes, I win a whole human life. But poverty in the third world is not at all like that. It is chronic; it has long-term structural causes; a life saved today may be lost for a different reason next year. There is a real question what the effects of sending financial aid really are. Improving the lot of the world’s poor is a macro-level problem; it involves changing the general conditions under which they live – the economic and political regimes, for instance – as well as the international context within which those domestic institutions operate. Finally, it is perhaps no accident that the person in Singer’s pond is a child, an innocent victim who we may assume slipped into the water quite unaware of the danger she was running. And she can’t get out without help. She is the quintessential patient and in no real sense an agent. And this encourages us to think of people living in poor countries in quite the wrong way, simply as victims in need of our help. Usually the people who make claims on our help are not only victims but also responsible agents capable of making choices for themselves – good choices from which they may benefit or bad choices from which they may lose. So questions about responsibility arise on their side as well. If they are starving because of crop failure, should they have planted different crops? If they are

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forum 59

poverty&thedutyofassistance

TP M

4th quarter 2006