Outsiders: our obligations to those beyond our borders
In Deen K. Chatterjee (ed.) The ethics of assistance, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 11–32
Abstract
In an article entitled “Famine, Affluence and Morality,”, first published in 1972, I argued that:it makes no moral difference whether the person I help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles awayAs far as I am aware, no one has disputed this claim in respect of distance per se – that is, the difference between 10 yards and 10,000 miles. Of course, the degree of certainty that we can have that our assistance will get to the right person, and will really help that person, may be affected by distance, and that can make a difference to what we ought to do, but that will depend on the particular circumstances we find ourselves in. The aspect of my claim that has been the subject of greatest philosophical dispute is the suggestion that our obligation to help a stranger is as great as our obligation to help a neighbor’s child. Several critics have claimed that we have special obligations to our family, friends, neighbors and fellow-citizens. Raymond Gastil, for example, has objected that:There is no doctrine of nonuniversalistic obligation with which Singer seriously deals. The flatness of his map of obligation and responsibility is suggested by the remark that “… unfortunately most of the major evils – poverty, overpopulation, pollution – are problems in which everyone is almost equally involved.”.
Quotes from this work
It is significant […] that whereas it is easy to find thinkers from different times and places to whom it is intuitively obvious that we have special obligations to those of our own religion, race, or ethnic affiliation, this does not seems so obvious to contemporary ethicists and political theorists. If the strength of intuitions favoring special obligations based on racial and religious affinity is not sufficient grounds for accepting them, then the strength of our intuitions about, say, special obligations based on fellow-citizenship, should also not be sufficient reason for accepting them. Instead, we need another test of whether they should be accepted.
[John Rawls] nowhere suggests that wealthy nations ought to try to assist poor nations to meet the basic needs of their citizens, except in so far as this is part of a much broader project of helping those peoples to attain liberal or decent institutions. The probability that, in the real world in which we live, tens of millions will starve or die from easily preventable illnesses before such institutions are attained, is not something to which Rawls directs his attention.