Who is Responsible



Who is Responsible?

David Miller

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 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 clarification. 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 dying from AIDS, should they have changed their sexual behaviour? These sound like hard questions and the answer may be that in each case they have a right to help regardless of how their predicament came about. But the thought behind them is that we fail to respect our fellow-human beings if we do not see them both as agents capable of taking responsibility for the outcomes of their actions and as vulnerable and needy creatures who may not be able to lead decent lives without the help of others. Singer's child-in-the-pond analogy encourages us to take up the second perspective but to ignore the first.

I can summarise my concerns about Singer's argument using the two concepts of responsibility distinguished earlier. First, Singer asks no questions about outcome responsibility for global poverty: he does not ask why so many are poor, whether responsibility lies with rich nations, with the governments of poor nations, etc etc – he treats poverty as if it were a natural phenomenon like an earthquake. Second, Singer has an implicit theory of remedial responsibility, namely that we are each remedially responsible for all the suffering we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable importance. The mere capacity to prevent suffering is by itself sufficient to assign responsibility. The presence of other people with a similar capacity matters to Singer only insofar as, if it were to turn out that others had already done enough to abolish poverty, then obviously my contribution would be unnecessary. For the reasons I have given, I think that on both counts Singer's view of responsibility for global poverty is implausible.

Thomas Pogge takes a very different approach to global poverty. Pogge's argument does take outcome responsibility seriously; he argues in fact that citizens of rich states are remedially responsible for the plight of the world's poor because they are implicated in responsibility for creating that predicament. He wants to attribute two forward-looking responsibilities to the citizens of rich states and their governments: the responsibility to redesign the international order so that it no longer has the harmful effects of the present one, and the responsibility to compensate the world's poor for the deprivation they have experienced up to now. These are positive responsibilities – they require citizens and states to take positive actions – but they stem from a previous failure to fulfil the negative responsibility not to impose an order that harms the world's poor.

Pogge does not deny that the proximate sources of global poverty are very often the domestic political and economic regimes under which the poor live. But he argues that these domestic factors are to be explained primarily in terms of the international context in which poor societies are placed. As he puts it, “it is quite possible that, within a different global order, national factors that tend to undermine the fulfilment of human rights would occur much less often, or not at all.” The present order, he argues, encourages “the emergence and endurance of brutal and corrupt elites” in developing societies. Moreover “the primary responsibility for this institutional context, for the prevailing global order, lies with the governments and citizens of the wealthy countries because we maintain this order, with at least latent coercion, and because we, and only we, could relatively easily reform it...”

Pogge's argument, in short, is that we, citizens of rich countries, are outcome responsible for global poverty, and since we have the means at our disposal to end it, we are remedially responsible too. It is a powerful argument, and many have found it persuasive, but it needs to be examined with some care.

Pogge, as I have said, does not deny that the immediate cause of poverty in a particular society may be a defective set of economic and political institutions, or that the reason why some societies have institutions that are inimical to growth, while others have managed to develop institutions that allow them to escape from serious poverty over a generation or two, may lie deep in the history and culture of the societies in question. But he continues to attribute responsibility for poverty to rich societies by claiming, as already noted, that if the global environment were different, these national factors would produce different results. But how relevant is this observation when we are allocating outcome responsibility for global poverty? Return for a moment to our case of two cars colliding on a roundabout, where the person in car A has been identified as outcome responsible for the damage by virtue of his reckless driving. It may well be true that if the roundabout had been replaced by traffic lights, this collision would not have occurred (driver A speeds at roundabouts but doesn't jump the lights); more generally it may be true that if traffic lights had been installed, fewer accidents, or perhaps no accidents at all, would have occurred at this intersection. Should we then conclude that responsibility for the accident rests not with driver A but with the road engineers who decided to install a roundabout there? This seems implausible: yet it also seems to provide an exact analogy to Pogge's claim about the international order and the national factors associated with poverty.

To see why this is mistaken, consider why it is wrong to attribute outcome responsibility for the car crash to the road engineers. They have designed a roundabout, let us suppose, which drivers of normal competence, paying due care and attention, can navigate safely. They might have chosen traffic lights, and reduced the accident level still further, but this would have caused significantly more congestion and frustration among drivers. In the light of this, their decision was a reasonable one. The careless driver of car A cannot shift responsibility off his shoulders by observing that in a different traffic environment the accident would not have occurred.

The question we should be asking about the global order, then, is whether it provides reasonable opportunities for societies to lift themselves out of poverty, or whether it places obstacles in their path that are quite difficult to overcome, requiring outstanding performance on the part of a developing society. Pogge does indeed notice that some historically poor societies have performed very well under the existing order, but he treats them as exceptional. He implies that the success stories were only made possible by the failure of other societies to develop.

Consider, however, the case of Ghana and Malaysia – two countries that were equally poor when they gained their independence from Britain in 1957. Now average incomes in Malaysia, over $3,000 per head, are ten times greater than those in Ghana. Why should we think that the institutions and policies that explain Malaysia's success have at the same time contributed to keeping the Ghanaians poor? Why not think instead that if Ghana had followed Malaysia's example, or perhaps a somewhat different model appropriate to its circumstances, its people would now be comfortably above the poverty threshold, as Malaysia's are?

There is a further feature of Pogge's theory that is worth highlighting here. He is very critical of what he calls “explanatory nationalism”, the idea that wealth and poverty are to be explained by domestic factors internal to each society, and so seems to reject the idea of national responsibility when considering the position of people in developing countries. He nonetheless holds a quite strong doctrine of national responsibility when it comes to explaining why ordinary citizens in rich societies can properly be taxed to provide compensation to the world's poor whose rights have been infringed by the policies pursued by Western governments. But why should this idea of collective responsibility apply to us but not to people living in poor countries for the harms they inflict on themselves?

So where does this leave us on the general question of responsibility for global poverty? Against Peter Singer, I have argued that it makes no sense to assign remedial responsibility for poverty to citizens of rich states without first considering the question of outcome responsibility – how and why poverty has arisen. Against Thomas Pogge, I have argued that his attempt to assign outcome responsibility for poverty entirely to the citizens of rich states and their governments is implausible. At the very least the responsibility should be shared between governments and international organisations who set the rules governing trade, investment flows, resource rights and other features of the global economy, and people in poor countries who support or acquiesce in regimes that reproduce poverty by siphoning off a large portion of GDP into military expenditure, presidential palaces and Swiss bank accounts.

But if this is the right story to tell about outcome responsibility, how do things stand when we turn to consider remedial responsibility? After all, ordinary people in poor countries can't be held remedially responsible for abolishing their own poverty – that would be absurd. So doesn't responsibility in the remedial sense inevitably fall on the shoulders of those who have the resources and the capacity to do something about world hunger and other forms of deprivation?

The answer to this question is a heavily qualified Yes. In the final analysis those of us who are able to help share in a responsibility to lift the world's poor to the point where their human rights can be fulfilled. But the qualifications matter too.

Our primary responsibility is to control our governments' policies and our international institutions so as to create a framework in which political communities world-wide can in turn take responsibility for their own fates. In other words, we want to bring about a situation in which outcome responsibility for poverty or wealth lies as far as possible with the communities in question. That would certainly mean some radical changes to the present order, of many different kinds. It would mean, for example, getting rid of one-sided dependency relationships in which the economic fate of one society depends very heavily on political decisions or consumer behaviour in another; it would mean regulating the prices of raw materials and primary products to avoid severe fluctuations, so that less developed countries could plan their investments in a reasonably stable economic environment; it might also mean allowing these countries to shelter infant industries from international competition to some extent; it would mean refusing to offer political, military or financial support to aspiring leaders seeking to overthrow democratic or quasi-democratic institutions; and so forth. It would also mean putting in place collective arrangements to deal with genuine natural disasters, droughts, floods, volcanic eruptions and so forth, on the grounds that these are both uncontrollable and to a large extent unpredictable by the political communities affected by them. If these and other similar reforms were put in place, then we could say that responsibility for global poverty would rest unequivocally with each separate political community in relation to its own members.

But what if, despite having achieved a good-enough international order, some people remain below the poverty line? Do we still have remedial responsibilities in these circumstances? I believe that we do, but here it is important to see how outcome responsibility assignments should influence our priorities. That is, our strongest remedial responsibilities are to those whose predicament we are plainly outcome responsible for creating. If country A dams the river that country B would normally use for irrigation purposes, causing a famine in B, then A has very strong remedial responsibilities to B. Next come cases in which neither party is outcome responsible for the poverty that needs remedying. Then finally cases where outcome responsibility lies primarily with the community whose members are now suffering the consequences.

These judgements may seem obvious; but debates about world poverty seem often to be premised on the assumption that all that should count is the extent of poverty in a particular place at a particular time – a kind of negative utilitarian criterion. Thus in the wake of the Asian tsunami disaster, there was some critical comment on the fact that people were willing to contribute large amounts of money to help tsunami victims, while it remained difficult for aid agencies to get people to give money for poverty relief in Africa, despite the fact that the numbers there were much greater, and the position of the victims in many cases worse. But donors were not wrong, I think, to take account of the fact that this was an event for which the victims could in no conceivable sense be held responsible. They fell into the middle category of cases where there is no responsibility on either side. African countries, rightly or wrongly, are seen as falling into the third.

If we think about poverty only in terms of the needs of those who suffer from it on one side, and the capacity of those on the other side to make resource transfers to the poor, this focuses our attention away from the institutional changes that might eventually serve to end or at least radically diminish world poverty. I am no sort of expert on the economics of aid; but one message clearly conveyed by even a cursory reading of the literature is that the positive or negative effect of aid in relieving poverty is heavily dependent on local institutions in the place where the aid is being sent. In the worst cases, aid can have much the same effects as those that Pogge attributes to the international resource and borrowing privileges in propping up local despots and warlords, because they're the ones who are able to control the flow of aid from the agencies to people on the ground; meanwhile some portion of the aid can be siphoned off for their own use. Pogge, of course, does direct our attention to institutions rather than to individual resource transfers. But the approach that he takes encourages us to think that if we were able to mend the defects in the current international order – get rid of the resource and borrowing privileges, for example – then the local sources of poverty such as exploitative regimes would disappear. I believe that we will make better policy by asking first where responsibility for world poverty really lies, without making the convenient assumption that outcome responsibility must lie with those agents – the rich nations – who are able to discharge remedial responsibility. The issue, however, is not only one of policy, important though that is. It is also an ethical issue, and the underlying question is whether we don't show the greatest respect for people the world over by always looking at them not only as needy and vulnerable creatures who in certain circumstances we may have to help but also as agents who are capable of taking charge of their own lives, and taking responsibility for the outcomes of their actions.

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

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