ABSTRACT

This chapter examines in detail the empirical view of the domestic causation of severe poverty, showing why it is false and also why it is so widely held in the developed world. It focuses on the empirical view that at least in the post-colonial era, which brought impressive growth in global per capita income, the causes of the persistence of severe poverty, and hence the key to its eradication, lie within the poor countries themselves. This reasoning connects three thoughts: there are great international variations in the evolution of severe poverty. The chapter discusses a virtue of Singer's argument that it reaches even those who subscribe to the Purely Domestic Poverty Thesis (PDPT), the view that the persistence of severe poverty is due solely to domestic causes. Negative duties not to support and not to pocket gains from an unfair institutional order that foreseeably contributes to severe deprivations are weightier than the positive duty to help relieve such deprivations.