causes of famine are complex. Certainly there are situations in which people are
clearly starving and direct food aid is required; the cost of the aid is quantifiable
and the media can report how much has been raised through private donation
and state aid. However, preventing famine requires more complicated coordina-
tion, which even states and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) may find
difficult to achieve. This is not simply a secondary point about how we fulfil our
moral duties, but a fundamental one about morality: because complex situations
require coordination we have to hand over responsibility to the state.- Faced with a world of suffering it is unclear what is required of us: it may be
reasonable to ask someone to sacrifice his $1,000 suit in order to save a drowning
child, but is it reasonable to hand over all your goods in excess of your basic
needs in order to feed the starving of the world? One response is to say that so
long as each person – through tax-generated development aid – gives (say) 1 per
cent of his or her income the duty to help the starving is fulfilled. It would be
easy to be cynical: people are just looking for excuses not to give up their luxuries
for the sake of the victims of famine. But a moral theory can be too demanding.
To say that we ought to do something implies that we are able to do so – ‘ought
implies can’ – and that means not only can we calculate what is required of us,
but the demands made on us are not excessive.
There is an important respect in which Sen’s analysis does support a moral duty
to prevent famine and that is the recognition of the role that economic forces –
supply and demand – play in causing famine. If the world is a single interdependent
economic system, albeit with some capacity on the part of individual nations to
manage their internal socio-economic relations, then we are all responsible for the
conditions which lead to famine. As we will see, the interaction argument is an
important one in the global justice debate.
In summary, the debate over famine opens up a number of issues: what the
relationship between morality and politics should be, and what the demand for
global redistribution presupposes about the nature of human agency. The complexity
of the causes of, and solutions to, famine may mean that how we behave in our
everyday lives does not translate directly or straightforwardly into duties to
redistribute goods across national communities. It is these issues that are at the
heart of arguments about global justice.
Cosmopolitanism
Interest among political philosophers in global justice is a relatively recent
development and has been strongly influenced by work on ‘domestic’ justice, inspired
above all by Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1972), which we discussed in Chapter 4.
Although there are internal differences we can identify three distinct positions:
cosmopolitanism, particularism and the ‘political conception’. Defenders of
cosmopolitanism have forced the pace in this debate, but the other two positions
are not merely reactions to cosmopolitanism, but represent self-subsistent
perspectives on global distribution. We start with cosmopolitanism, focusing on the
work of Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge.486 Part 4 Contemporary ideas