ABSTRACT
Before exploring the ethics of global poverty, we need to get clear on the subject of our inquiry. To do so, we will examine the concept of poverty. An adequate conception of global poverty should be able to identify who is poor, identify what their poverty consists of, and identify what characteristics or features of their life would need to change to make it such that they are no longer poor. With this conceptual understanding in hand, adequate measures of global poverty should be able to provide information on the levels, trends, distributions, and dynamics of material and social deprivation. In this chapter we will explore five competing conceptions of global poverty, some of the ways in which it is measured, and how poverty is thought to be distributed across the globe.
