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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2012
One relatively straightforward way in which academics could have a positive impact on global poverty is by putting people in a position to make better decisions about issues relevant to such poverty. Academics could do this by conducting appropriate kinds of research on those issues, and sharing what they have learned in accessible ways.
But aren't academics already doing this? In the case of many of those issues, I think the appropriate answer would be “Yes, to some extent, but they could do so much better.” In this article, I first discuss the academic research relevant to one important decision about an issue concerning global poverty. I argue that this research has been seriously deficient both in terms of quality and of quantity. Building on this discussion, I then formulate two questions that can be applied to any such decision, answers to which would indicate the quality of the input academics are currently providing. In cases where that input is deficient, and the decision in question an important one, I suggest that academics organise themselves in ways that will improve that input. I finish by briefly discussing how Academics Stand Against Poverty might help them do so.
1 I take this decision as my main example simply because I know the academic debate about it relatively well—not because I take NGO aid to be more important than official aid, or aid in general to be more significant for global poverty than many other issues.
2 Not the only way, of course; the global rich might also contribute by taking part in certain campaigns, for example. If one is relatively affluent, though, one ought at least to consider whether one should give some of one's money, whatever else one does. Organizing effective campaigns costs money, moreover, so if one considers such work to be especially important one might use one's donations to support it.
3 I will no go into details here; I trust these issues will be broadly familiar to most readers of this article.
4 Again, I will not go into the details here, but for reviews of NGO aid that discuss such concerns, see, e.g., Fowler, Alan, “Civil Society, NGDOs and Social Development: Changing the Rules of the Game,” Occasional Paper No. 1 (Geneva: UNRISD, 2000)Google Scholar; and Lewis, David, The Management of Non-Governmental Development Organizations, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar.
5 On the lack of rigorous research on the effects of aid in general, see, e.g., William D. Savedoff, Ruth Levine, and Nancy Birdsall, “When Will We Ever Learn? Improving Lives Through Impact Evaluation” (Center for Global Development, 2006); and a number of the papers collected in Easterly, William, ed., Reinventing Foreign Aid (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008)Google Scholar. On the lack of such research concerning NGO aid in particular, see, e.g., Rick Davies, “Monitoring and Evaluating NGO Achievements” (2001); http://www.mande.co.uk/docs/arnold.htm; and Riddell, Roger, Does Foreign Aid Really Work? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chaps. 16–19Google Scholar.
6 The category of “aid specialists,” as I am using that term, would include both specialists in particular sectors (such as health or finance or agriculture) and people with broad experience across the field of aid and/or development.
7 Naturally all such claims in this essay are similarly “to my knowledge,” but I will not repeat this each time. Some aid specialists do address the question of how good or bad the effects are. Those who do so tend to focus mainly on emphasizing the lack of rigorous research, though, and the consequent difficulty of making such an estimate (see, e.g., Fowler, “Civil Society,” pp. 11–20; and Riddell, Does Foreign Aid Really Work?). They do not then go on to ask the next questions that arise for potential contributors: “Given this lack of rigorous research, what is the most reasonable assumption to make about the effects? If one cannot make any sort of estimate, no matter how rough or qualified, about the effects of NGO aid as a whole, can one at least make such estimates about certain types of aid or NGOs? Are there, in particular, any NGO activities that one can say with at least some confidence have effects that are good enough?”
8 Let us say that the effects would “support” a requirement to give if those effects were good enough to imply such a requirement, given certain justified moral premises.
9 A very selective bibliography might include Singer, Peter, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972), pp. 229–43Google Scholar; Singer, Peter, The Life You Can Save (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Aiken, William and LaFollette, Hugh, eds., World Hunger and Moral Obligation (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977)Google Scholar; Aiken, William and LaFollette, Hugh, eds., World Hunger and Morality (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1996)Google Scholar; O'Neill, Onora, Faces of Hunger (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986)Google Scholar; Unger, Peter, Living High and Letting Die (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chatterjee, Deen K., ed., The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cullity, Garrett, The Moral Demands of Affluence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pogge, Thomas, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 2008)Google Scholar.
10 Recently some philosophers have started paying more attention to that literature; see, e.g., Garrett Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence, esp. chap. 3; Jamieson, Dale, “Duties to the Distant: Humanitarian Aid, Development Assistance, and Humanitarian Intervention,” Journal of Ethics 9 (2005), pp. 151–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leif Wenar in a number of papers, including “The Basic Structure as Object: Institutions and Humanitarian Concern,” in Weinstock, Daniel, ed., Global Justice, Global Institutions (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007), pp. 253–78Google Scholar; and Wenar, Leif, “Poverty Is No Pond: Challenges for the Affluent,” in Illingworth, Patricia, Pogge, Thomas, and Wenar, Leif, eds., Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. To my knowledge, though, even these philosophers have said very little about the questions just noted in the main text. The nearest thing to an exception I am aware of is some discussion of how ordinary people might try to arrive at a credible estimate of the effects in Wenar's work and in Horton, Keith, “Aid Agencies: The Epistemic Question,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 28 (2011), pp. 29–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 I should perhaps add that the great majority of philosophers who have discussed the moral status of giving to NGOs have endorsed some such assumption (as I do myself). Most of those who have argued against such an assumption, moreover, have done so on very thin anecdotal grounds; see, e.g., Schmidtz, David, “Islands in a Sea of Obligation: An Essay on the Duty to Rescue,” Law and Philosophy 19 (2000), pp. 683–705Google Scholar.
12 In addition to many of the pieces cited in note 10 above, see, e.g., Murphy, Liam B., Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Herman, Barbara, “The Scope of Moral Requirement,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 30 (2001), pp. 227–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Miller, Richard W., “Beneficence, Duty, and Distance,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 32 (2004), pp. 357–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 I take it as uncontroversial that one person's view about a certain issue may be more reliable than another's even without such probative grounds, due to such factors as their training and education; their experience; their familiarity with the relevant subject matter; their intelligence, insight, and other intellectual qualities; and so on.
14 Some have already begun to do so, such as groups that use randomized evaluations, like the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (www.povertyactionlab.org/) and Innovations for Poverty Action (http://www.poverty-action.org/). There is of course a debate about what kind of research on the effects counts as rigorous, and whether any such research has general probative value. I do not have space to go into these questions here. (For discussion of randomized evaluations in particular, see, e.g., Angus Deaton, “Instruments of Development: Randomization in the Tropics, and the Search for the Elusive Keys to Economic Development,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, 2009; and Cohen, Jessica and Easterly, William, eds., What Works in Development? (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2009)Google Scholar. For an NGO perspective on evaluation in general, see Roche, Chris, “The Seeming Simplicity of Measurement,” in Horton, Keith and Roche, Chris, eds., Ethical Questions and International NGOs (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010Google Scholar.) For now I will just say that to the extent that there is such a thing as research on the effects that has general probative value, more such research should be conducted; to the extent that there is not, the other task I have highlighted (of sharing views about the effects based at least as much on judgment as on more probative grounds) is the one to focus on. So in either case there is a lot more that aid specialists could do.
15 As David H. Hull puts it, “We seem to find every issue to be so complicated that we cannot possibly do anything but debate some more.” Hull, David H., “The Social Responsibility of Professional Societies,” Metaphilosophy 33 (2002), pp. 552–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 555. This article forms part of a symposium, “On the Philosopher as Public Intellectual,” which includes a number of papers that are relevant to the issues discussed in this special issue on ASAP.
16 I comment on such factors especially in relation to philosophy, as that is the discipline I am most familiar with. For some not dissimilar reflections concerning other disciplines (especially development economics), see Devesh Kapur, “Philanthropy, Self-Interest and Accountability: American Universities and Developing Countries,” in Illingworth et al., Giving Well. Kapur also makes an important argument in this paper for increasing the accountability of academics who do work that affects people in developing countries.
17 In some circumstances there may also be problems in finding forms of input that are accessible to general audiences without oversimplifying the relevant subject matter in ways that are misleading or falsifying; for a little discussion of this in relation to research on the effects of the work NGOs do, see Horton, Keith, “An Appeal to Aid Specialists,” Development Policy Review 28 (2010), pp. 27–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 36–37.
18 For a response to some objections to the claim that donations to NGOs are likely to increase if people are given more reason to believe that the effects of their work are good enough, see Horton, “An Appeal,” pp. 37–39.
19 Here I am making the plausible assumption that at least some of the relevant activities are scalable; that is, that they can usefully absorb more funds. If, on the other hand, it turns out that no (scalable) NGO activities have effects that are good enough, then it would of course also be helpful to find that out. Those who believe they should contribute to tackling global poverty could then turn their attention to other more suitable forms of action.
20 See Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save, p. 65.
21 Academics Stand Against Poverty has recently launched a project that is likely to include something of this kind. This is the Global Poverty Consensus Report, which is aimed at identifying and articulating the overlapping consensus that lies beneath the surface of much academic disagreement on global poverty alleviation in a way that is suitable for feeding into the Millennium Development Goal replacement process; academicsstand.org/projects/the-global-poverty-consensus-report/.
22 This is in effect what I do in “An Appeal to Aid Specialists,” made on behalf of both philosophers and ordinary people trying to arrive at a credible estimate about the effects. It is also something GiveWell does in a more general way in its blog, “Suggestions for the Social Sciences.” As they put it, “On one hand, we do not have staff with backgrounds in academia. . . . On the other hand, through our work researching charities we do have an unusual amount of experience trying to use academic research to make concrete decisions. In a sense we are a “customer” of academia; think of this as customer feedback”; blog.givewell.org/2011/05/19/suggestions-for-the-social-sciences/[italics and boldface in original].
23 This is particularly likely to be so in those fields where the relevant decision-makers actually commission some of the research themselves. For one reason or another, though, many important groups of decision-makers, including both the global rich and the global poor in general, and more particular groups among the global rich and the global poor, do not tend to commission such research.
24 See the other contributions to this special issue (especially Roger Riddell's) for some specific suggestions about priority issues for academics to focus on.
25 This point is made by Kapur in “Philanthropy” (see esp. pp. 280–81); and by Riddell in his contribution to this special issue.
