What justice demands

The big American media have been giving much attention to the initiative of super-billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to have other billionaires pledge at least 50 per cent of their fortune to charity. It is the biggest philanthropic thrust in history and it is gathering momentum. Fortune magazine calls it 'The $600-billion Challenge' (Cover story, July 5), as its listed 400 wealthiest Americans are worth $1.2 trillion.

The initiative actually first came from Warren Buffet in 1986. Fortune published a front-cover feature on him, then titled, 'Should You Leave It All to Your Children?' with Buffet saying a categorical "no"! Twenty years later, Fortune published a cover feature which revealed that Buffet intended to give away all his Berkshire Hathaway fortune.

Philanthropic pledge

Buffet and Gates have been rallying the troops. In a poignant piece written by Buffet himself in the July 5 issue of Fortune, 'My Philanthropic Pledge', he says, self-effacingly: "Millions of people who regularly contribute to churches, schools and other organisations thereby relinquish the use of funds that would otherwise benefit their own families. The dollars these people drop into a collection plate or give to United Way mean foregone movies, dinners out ... In contrast, my family and I will give up nothing we need or want by fulfilling this 99 per cent pledge".

Buffet then makes a noteworthy point: "Were we to use more than one per cent of my claim cheques on ourselves, neither our happiness nor our well-being would be enhanced. In contrast, that remaining 99 per cent can have a huge effect on the health and welfare of others." As simple as Buffet has put it, the issues he raises are the subject of complex and critical philosophical tomes on the issue of justice and its demands. But whereas Buffet, Gates and others are lauded for their great charity and benevolence, there are some philosophers and social scientists who say they actually have a duty, an obligation, to help those in need. So they are fulfilling a duty, not showing benevolence.

Americans give more than any other nation on earth, with philanthropic generosity in the region of US$300 billion annually. But figures for 2005 show that individual charitable donations amounted to only 1.6 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Average per capita income in the United States (US) is more than US$40,000.

Says Thomas Pogge, a leading advocate of the poverty-as-a-human-rights-violation view, in his edited work, Freedom From Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor? "It is clear that a principle according to which affluent agents have some kind of a duty to aid the chronically poor cannot be reasonably rejected ... . The cost to destitute individuals lacking secure access to basic necessities is that their vital interests are threatened and their lives drastically stunted and impoverished. This will clearly outweigh the cost to affluent agents imposed by at least some kind of duty to aid. The central question here is whether this duty of aid should be seen as a duty of benevolence or a duty of basic justice to which the chronically poor are entitled as a human right."

Poverty and human rights

The intellectuals pushing for the recognition of poverty as a human rights issue know that they face an uphill task, but they are undaunted. They know that, previously, the intellectual assault on slavery, women's discrimination and environmental rape seemed futile and the challenges insurmountable. But little by little, through theory and praxis, progress was attained.

Sure, there are knotty problems and perplexing issues to work out and we have to engage in moral self-scrutiny.

As Kant says in his Metaphysics of Morals, "the first command of all duties to oneself" is to "know yourself in terms of your moral perfection in relation to your duty".

Let's talk about moral duty. It is interesting that Christians talk so much about morality - and obsess about homosexuality, adultery, premarital sex, abortion - while some ignore fundamental moral issues.

The pre-eminent animal rights philosopher Peter Singer, in a ground-breaking article in Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1972, proposed the following theory of justice: "If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance, we ought morally to do it." Singer then offered an example which would later become popular in philosophy classes.

Moral duty

"If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing." Singer was led to reflect on these issues because of a major famine during the early part of that decade. It was Singer's view that all affluent people in the world had a moral duty - a demand of justice - to give away money to the famine, "up to the point at which by giving more one would begin to cause suffering to oneself and one's dependents".

But why should affluent people bear a duty to do something when it might have been the irresponsibility, corruption and/or disastrous economic and political decisions of rulers which resulted in that famine or poverty of the masses? Who really bears the responsibility? And if one is not directly involved in oppressing people and in causing their poverty, does one have an obligation to them at all? Yes, according to some philosophers. You see, we not only have perfect obligations or duties, but imperfect duties or obligations.

Let me illustrate: A woman is attacked and then murdered in full view of bystanders, but her cries for assistance go unheeded. The woman's freedom not to be violated was assaulted. The assaulter had a duty not to attack and kill the woman - that is his perfect obligation. But the bystanders had an indirect (imperfect) obligation to give assistance if they could. In France, there is actually a law which provides for criminal liabi-lity for omissions if a person does not provide help to others suffering transgression of their rights.

Even here, people can be charged for not reporting certain crimes. So, while a mother or sweetheart might not be the one abusing a minor, if she knows of the abuse, she has a duty and a legal responsibility to report that crime. A lot of us don't think about these imperfect obligations. We feel that as long as we are not directly violating people's rights, harming them or oppressing them, we are not guilty of injustice. But what about our responsibility - our duty - to assist those whose rights are being violated directly by others?

IMPERFECT DUTY

Those citizens in Nazi Germany who were not in Hitler's army directly torturing and killing Jews, but who knew what was happening and did nothing to protest, are seen by many as also as guilty as those who operated the gas chambers. They were not primary, direct oppressors and they did their perfect duty to do no harm to anyone, but in their imperfect duty to protect, they failed. In a thought-provoking essay in the Spring 2010 issue of The Journal of Social Philosophy ('Roles in Oppression: Primary Agents, Bystanders and Victims') Thomas E. Hill Jr admits that "primary agents of oppression ... typically bear a different and greater responsibility than bystanders" but, nevertheless, bystanders do bear some moral responsibility.

"Bystanders, nevertheless, can be enablers of oppression in ways that amount to complicity. They may be regarded as adding to the oppression of the victims through their omissions and passivity." Hill comments that during the Inquisition, bystanders "watched the burnings without protesting, continued to accept the authority of the perpetrators and did not question the Inquisitors assumptions or reasoning. Their passivity contributed to the harm, and helped to perpetuate the oppressive system." The same with those whites who passively accepted slavery in the American South.

But get back to Singer's point about our moral duty to help when doing so does not sacrifice an equal or greater good. How are we doing with that? Especially in this 'Christian' country? Philosopher Kenneth Himma, in an article on theodicy, makes a strong case that, counter-intuitively, more evil than good is being done in the world and this must be a problem for Christian theology.

In the March 2010 issue of the Cambridge University-published philosophical journal, Religious Studies ('Plantinga's Version of the Free-Will Argument: The Good and Evil that Free Beings Do'), Himma says Christians have a responsibi-lity to look after the poor and will be judged harshly if they neglect to do so according to Matthew 25:33-47 ("For I was hungry and you gave me no food ..." etc).

He says, whenever he gives the Singer illustration of the child's dying in the pond, almost everyone agrees it would be horribly wicked not to save the child. "When I point out that the $30 they spend on a movie can sustain a child's life for a month, they are committing the same wrong, they have a second emotionally charged reaction - how selfish their own behaviour is."

CHRISTIAN ETHICS

Himma says if we have a duty to do good without sacrificing a comparable good - and that is justice - "Every time we make a frivolous purchase with discretionary income, we are violating an obligation and committing a grave wrong. I do not love my dying neighbour as I do myself when I can save her life with a small commitment of cash that I opt to spend on my own amusement. By those admittedly demanding standards, it is not unreasonable to think that we, in the affluent world, are fairly characterised as doing more bad than good from the standpoint of Christian ethics."

But Christians would rather spend their time hunting down homo-sexuals, adulterers, fornicators and abortionists and inveighing against gamblers than rigorously pursuing those justice issues. In fact, to the average Christian, those issues don't figure at all. A few US dollars can save lives of children in Mali, Nepal, Bangladesh, Burma and Sao Paulo, Brazil. When we ignore the pleas on television to help save a life by contributing to a child's surgery and instead spend on an expensive vacation, are we not behaving unjustly? Disturbing questions. But the unexamined life should not be worth living, to quote Socrates.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be contacted at ianboyne1@yahoo.com or feedback sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.

If one is not directly involved in oppressing people and in causing their poverty, doesone have an obligation to them at all?