nations would starve. The willingness of the wealthy in the West to contribute
through redistributive taxation to help their poor compatriots may depend on a
mixture of self-interest – fear of social unrest – and genuine compassion, but
whatever the motivation there must be a background sense of obligation. The Irish
famine of the 1840s provides a useful illustration of what happens when that sense
is absent. For Irish nationalists the famine became symbolic of British attitudes to
Ireland. The fact that food was shipped out of Ireland has led to the accusation
that the famine was not only an act of omission – a failure to assist – but tantamount
to an act of commission: there was a deliberate policy of starvation, which, in effect,
was genocide. Sen argues that there is nothing mysterious about food exports during
time of famine: market forces determine that food goes to places where people can
afford it. Preventing market interaction is not, Sen suggests, the answer; rather,
intervention to enable people to acquire the ability to buy food is the correct
response, and here politics and mutual sympathy are important. The British response
to the Irish famine – just like their response to the Bengal famine a hundred years
later – was not marked by a genocidal mentality, but was characterised by an absence
of sympathy which, had it existed, would have led to pressure on the British state
to put in place remedial and preventive measures. That British rule in India was
not democratic and that Ireland did not enjoy the status of Scotland within the
United Kingdom was relevant, but what was significant in the Irish case – especially
given that Ireland was not technically a colony – was cultural alienation (Sen, 1999:
173).
Ethical and political implications
Sen’s analysis of the causes of famine may not appear inconsistent with Singer’s:
Singer would accept that while we have a moral duty to relieve famine how we
fulfil that duty is a technical matter. Sen, on the other hand, is concerned with
empirical, rather than moral, questions (although implicit in his discussion are
moral claims, which he makes explicit in other writings). We would, however, make
three points:
- Once we recognise that there is a political dimension to famine then Singer’s
simple analogy between the drowning child and the starving child breaks down.
The duty to rescue the child is straightforwardly a moral one: we do not wait
to find out the child’s nationality. There may be a moral duty to help a starving
child, but in this case there is also a political dimension that alters the moral
duty. While starvation is, almost by definition, suffering caused by the absence
of food, and as such analogous to drowning, famine is the absence of the means
of acquiring food. This point cannot be dismissed simply as one about means –
that is, saving the famished child is just a lot more complex than saving the
drowning child – rather, the fact that the world is organised into nation-states
means that there are other people who have a greater duty to save the famished
child. This is a qualitative difference, and not just a quantitative one of proximity. - Singer suggests that communication enables us to recognise the needs of starving
people; we cannot hide behind a ‘lack of knowledge’. The needs of the starving
child are just as obvious as those of the drowning child. In Sen’s analysis the
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