ABSTRACT
It is generally assumed, at least by people interested in global ethics, that individuals in rich countries in the “North” have obligations to help alleviate world poverty through supporting relevant charities, and that countries in the North likewise have obligations to provide aid, which, apart from helping with development more generally in poor countries, is focused on programmes that reduce extreme poverty. The arguments that in principle individuals have obligations to do this derive from a number of sources – philosophical theories, religious worldviews, and so on – and can generally be seen as “cosmopolitan” in conception (though the term will not always be used). The argument that countries should do the same, apart from similar cosmopolitan considerations in the background, depends on considerations such as the fact that international agreements have been made – notably the commitment by rich countries made in the 1970s to give 0.7 per cent of Gross National Product (GNP) in aid to poor countries – or the fact that the democratic electorates may mandate such aid policies. The issues of aid came to be more prominent as global issues after the Second World War.
The United Nations Charter (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) set out the goal of the progressive realization of human rights including the social and economic rights to the conditions of a decent human life. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), along with other specialist agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), was set up, and set in train the “development decades” in which the twin goals of poverty reduction and reducing the gap between rich and poor countries were axiomatic. Meanwhile, philosophers, theologians and other thinkers were beginning to think hard about the ethical challenge of world poverty, given that a fifth of the world’s population was living in extreme poverty in a world increasing in affluence overall in which there was increased capacity for those in some parts of the world to do something about what happened in other parts of the world. This challenge is par excellence a challenge within the field we now call global ethics. If global
ethics is about the ethical relations that people have across the globe, then the questions “What obligations do individuals in one country have towards individuals in other countries in respect to reducing their poverty?” and “Why do we have such obligations?” are global ethics questions – even if, earlier on, they would not have been described in this way.
