Moral Responsibility for Global Poverty (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Ethics, Ruhr-University of Bochum, language: English, abstract: This paper asks the following four questions: What is our moral responsibility for global poverty? Can historical injustices such as slavery and colonialism be linked to backward-looking responsibilities? Can the allocation of moral responsibility to rich and poor people be justified? Considering both, humanitarian and development aid, which of the two concepts is the more effective one in the face of the huge challenges of world poverty?

The answer of the third question focuses immediately on the responsible actors that come into question, and the fourth on moral claims brought forward along with the practical implementation of particular claims. Having outlined the subject of the matter of this paper, it is now important to make clear the aims of it. These are twofold. First, it aims to explore in depth and to evaluate competing philosophical perspectives on the issue of moral responsibility towards the poor. As such it seeks to provide a comprehensive analysis of three important contributions to this topic. These are the ethical theories of Peter Singer, Thomas Pogge and David Miller, whose disparate viewpoints lay a good foundation for the depiction of fundamental dissimilarities.

Second, my investigation seeks, on the one hand, to show that a proper allocation of moral responsibility to rich and poor people under certain conditions is possible; and on the other hand, to provide a defence of the claim that development aid is the more appropriate concept of aid for combating poverty-related issues instead of humanitarian aid in view of the adverse criticism of Singer's theory. In the end, I shall propose points that could make development aid more effective.