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More Than Charity: Cosmopolitan Alternatives to the “Singer Solution”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Extract

Nothing is more politically important to think about, and act upon, than global poverty relief. Numbers can mask the human faces of poverty, but they do bring out its scale: Today, any day, 30,000 children under the age of five will die from preventable illness and starvation. A further 163 million children who will survive this day are severely undernourished. Some 1.2 billion people will try to subsist on less than one dollar a day, while 2.4 billion will not have access to basic sanitation.

Type
Debate: Global Poverty Relief
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2002

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References

1 These figures are from the United Nations Human Development Report 2001 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 913Google Scholar.

2 World Bank, World Development Indicator 2000, table 6.8 (provides definitions and measures of the limited extent of development assistance), available at http://www.worldbank.org/data/wdi2000/pdfs/tab6_8.pdfGoogle Scholar.

3 Cited in Dennis Leyden, Thinking Critically in Economics, Web edition, at http://www.uncg.edu/eco/dpleyden/ctworkbook/hbookldiscussions(2e).htm.

4 Singer, Peter, “Famine, Affluence and Morality” (1972), reprinted in his Writings on an Ethical Life (New York: Ecco Press, 2000), p. 105–17Google Scholar.

5 Singer, Peter, “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” (1999)Google Scholar, reprinted in Writings on an Ethical

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21 John Dunn has repeatedly stressed the centrality of these questions to political understanding. See his The Cunning of Unreason (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

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29 For an empirical study of this kind of informed efficacy, from the perspective of the media as agents, see Kuper, Andrew and Kuper, Jocelyn, “Serving a New Democracy: Must the Media Speak Softly'?” International Journal of Public Opinion Reseach 13, no. 4 (2001), pp. 355–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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31 My thanks to Sanjay Reddy for insisting on this pointGoogle Scholar.

32 O'Neill, “Agents of Justice.” O'Neill has long argued, eloquently and persuasively that we need to know the corresponding and specific agent of obligation if we are to have a clear conception of the content of rights and the plausibility of claiming them.Google Scholar

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39 The need to take incentives seriously was one reason Rawls settled on “maximin” rather than “maximize” as a distributive principleGoogle Scholar.

40 The ILO Social Finance Unit itself insists on this point; see http://www.i10.org/public/english/employment/finance

41 Cited in Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 464Google Scholar.