Are 'the affluent' responsible for global poverty?. Issue 1 (1st January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Lawford-Smith, Holly
• Is Part Of: Ethics & global politics. Volume 12:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: 61
• Page End: 67
• Publication Date: 2019-01-01
• Subjects: Poverty -- obligations -- collectives -- uncoordinated groups -- the affluent; International relations -- Moral and ethical aspects -- Periodicals; Political ethics -- Periodicals; Ethics -- Periodicals; Ethics; International relations -- Moral and ethical aspects; Political ethics; Periodicals; Electronic journals; 172.4
• DOI: 10.1080/16544951.2019.1565611
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1654-6369

Abstract

ABSTRACT: According to Christian Barry & Gerhard Øverland (2016), there are multiple ways "the affluent" might be morally responsible for the situation the global poor are in, including having failed to assist them on a single occasion or on multiple occasions; by enabling harm to them; by 'giving rise to cost' for them; by making it costly for the poor to escape their own suffering; by exploiting them; by overdetermining harm to them. But what exactly is this group, "the affluent", who Barry and Øverland present as being capable of doing all these things? In this paper I present three possible conceptions of 'the affluent', and argue that they all create problems for the conclusions the authors want to reach.