ABSTRACT
Severe poverty, together with climate change, are the two most important moral problems facing our present generation. The choices we make in the next few years will decide the life chances of billions of human beings; the inhabitability of large areas of the planet, and the survival or demise of numerous ecosystems. We now face choices that people only two generations ago could not even contemplate, and we now have the power to address these threats and thus the choice “to do or not to do.” Our generation can in fact eradicate the most severe global poverty and reduce other types of poverty as well as protect many vulnerable people from the miseries of deprivation. We have the economic means to do so. In the same way, our generation has the ability to arrest environmental crisis and even to reverse some of the already visible damage to the balance of global ecosystems. We have the technological and economic means to do so. The question remains, however, do we also have the will to do it?
