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The Fallacy Of Philanthropy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Paul Gomberg
Paul Gomberg*
Affiliation:
Chicago State University, Chicago, IL60628-1598, USA
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Extract

Should we stop spending money on things we do not really need and send the money instead to groups that aid victims of absolute poverty? Garrett Cullity and Peter Unger have given renewed vigor to the well known argument by Peter Singer that we should do this. Like Singer, Cullity and Unger compare our duties to the poor to our duties when we encounter a victim of calamity, such as a child in danger of drowning. (Unger argues that our duties to the poor are even more pressing.) Singer and Unger tell us what to do and why we must do it; most starkly, Unger gives us the names, addresses, and toll-free phone numbers of four organizations to which we can donate, and the book cover tells us that the author's royalties are going equally to Oxfam America and the U.S. Committee for UNICEF. Unger dissolves the divide between theory and practice.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 29 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2002

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References

1 Garrett Cullity, ‘International Aid and the Scope of Kindness/ Ethics 105 (1994) 99-127; Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press 1996); Peter Singer, ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality/ Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972) 229-43 and, as restated with differences, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), ch. 8. Page references in text are to Practical Ethics.

2 In its ordinary use ‘philanthropy’ refers to the practice of giving resources for worthy causes; I have extended this use to refer to a proposal advocating a particular philanthropic practice and an assimilation that grounds that proposal. I hope the reader will forgive that extension. Elsewhere (’Consequentialism and History/ Canadian journal of Philosophy 19 [1989] 383-403), I used ‘philanthropism’ for this same proposal, but I prefer to avoid that ugly coinage.

3 But why the emphasis on the philanthropists, particularly Singer and his direct defenders? The literature addressing absolute poverty has grown huge over the past thirty years. I focus on the philanthropists because they address what each of us must do to address poverty and they purport to do so a-theoretically; that is, they are not drawing out the consequences of a particular moral theory but addressing each of us and arguing that our own moral beliefs require a change in our behavior.

4 What Singer writes is that the principle supports the particular judgment that I should save the child. This may be true in the sense that the general principle articulates the moral ground of the particular judgment. But surely it is more obvious that I should save the child than that the principle is true. So in a different, epistemological, sense the particular judgment is intended as an argument that we should accept the general principle as the best explanation of why it is wrong to ignore the plight of the child.

5 A referee for CJP believes that this interpretation of Unger is wrong, that Unger takes for granted without argument that we hold a primary value of lessening suffering rather than inferring that we hold that value from examples; Unger is often distrustful of our intuitions in different cases. In contrast, I interpret Unger as arguing that because some of our intuitions display and reflect our basic moral values, we can infer that we hold these values from those intuitions; other intuitions mislead us as to our values because in those cases we are insufficiently attentive to suffering or we are influenced by irrelevant features. In many cases of rescue, suffering is vivid for us; from these cases, I believe, Unger infers that we hold lessening suffering as a primary value.

6 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1985)

7 With Williams's authority I use the term ‘Hegelian’ for this insistence on the authority of ordinary ethical thought and practice. Williams's writing is in a Hegelian spirit in resisting universalist revisions of our Sittlichkeit. I ignore here Hegel's theory of history, which gave special import to the Sittleichkeit of liberal capitalism. 8 See Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989), 11-15.

9 The disagreement between the more cognitivist view of morality held by the philanthropists and the Hegelian view of ethical life as social practice is beyond the scope of this essay. But the reader should keep in mind that such profound disagreements are in the background.

10 Williams is not the only one to note that we recognize special duties of rescue. Shelly Kagan, Normative Morality (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1998) 133-5 writes that common sense morality recognizes a special duty to rescue. Kagan seems skeptical that we can identify a relevant difference that would justify a special duty here. In Sections V and VI, I will explain why we treat rescue differently, but it is not the sort of account that Kagan would count as a justification. F.M. Kamm is more sympathetic than Kagan to the special character of duties of rescue (but she says little to explicate or justify them); see ‘Faminine Ethics: the Problem of Distance in Morality and Singer's Ethical Theory’ in Singer and His Critics, Dale Jamieson, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell 1999), 178-80 where she suggests a contrast between duties of rescue and issues of justice.

11 In correspondence Cullity acknowledges that an argument is needed for a more general reason but believes that it can be supplied. He points out that, in the context of encountering the child in need of rescue, there is nothing particular about that child that requires me to rescue him; we would have the same obligation to anyone whom we so encountered. This reply slights the role of context: we encounter a particular person in need of rescue. Granted, there is nothing special about that person beyond his being the person one encounters. Still, the reason to help is specific and contextual. Without the context of encountering a person in need of rescue the obligation to help disappears.

12 This is the observation of a social philosopher using his own intuitions as data in order to understand his ethical culture, noting a distinction implicit in our ethical life. I make no practical assertions here about what I think we should do.

13 Singer applies utilitarian thinking to cases of rescue in his essay ‘Reconsidering the Famine Relief Argument’ in Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue, edsv Food Policy: The Responsibility of the United States in the Life and Death Choices (New York: Free Press 1977) 36-53; he proposes that, for utilitarian reasons, we might not aid an adult who repeatedly puts himself in danger by skating on thin ice (45). I suggest we would rescue him but might restrain him in some way or prosecute him for endangering his rescuers (as is sometimes done); we would not just let him drown. Here Singer's utilitarianism gives answers about our duty to rescue that are at variance with our shared ethical culture, a culture he is appealing to when he gives the argument to assist. For more on this problem for Singer, see note 20 below.

14 This conception is developed further in my ‘How Morality Works and Why It Fails: On Political Philosophy and Moral Consensus/ Journal of Social Philosophy 28 (1997) 43-70. (What I here call ‘ethical life’ or ‘ethical culture’ I there call ‘morality.’) Does this conception of ethical life capture all of what moral philosophy is properly interested in? I am inclined to think it does and have suggested that conclusion in ‘How Morality Works/ but I do not assume that conclusion here.

15 This is E.F. Carritt's example, as quoted in John Rawls, ‘Two Concepts of Rules/ Philosophical Review 64 (1955) 3-32.

16 We think strategically about how to fulfill an ethical duty. If my brother has a drinking problem and comes to me for money, I may decide not to give it to him because he will use it on drink and thus harm himself, a form of consequentialist reasoning (this is an example suggested by a referee for CJP). But this reasoning does not qualify my familial duties; it clarifies them and guides me in fulfilling them. Consequentialist reasoning also may decide among conflicting duties; if, while driving five injured people to a hospital, I must ignore a drowning child, then I may do so. This pits rescue against rescue.

17 The view of ethical life developed in the next few pages is broadly Darwinian and only minimally functionalist. That is, our norms arise in the natural history of human society. They vary from society to society; yet some are nearly universal. I say ‘minimally functionalist’ because, from a Darwinian view, whatever norms have survived in the natural history of society must have enabled some people to survive in those social groups. This is far from suggesting any ‘maximizing’ conception of our norms such as rule utilitarianism, which would imply that the norms are (or should be) maximally beneficial. But we can expect them to make some sort of sense in enabling people to cooperate socially, thus ‘minimally functionalist.’ The relevance of these observations to moral philosophy is this: because ethical intuitions derive from social norms that arise in the history of a particular society, we should not expect that our ethical beliefs signify that we accept general values or principles. In calling my views ‘Darwinian’ the reader should not infer that I am sympathetic with the recent biodeterminist speculations variously called ‘sociobiology’ or more recently ‘evolutionary psychology.’ I find most of those speculations unwarranted. A Darwinian natural history of culture was articulated thirty years ago in Alexander Alland, Jr., Evolution and Human Behavior, 2nd ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books 1973). This approach has been developed more rigorously by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1985) and in other publications of these two authors. These theories are far from the more fashionable biodeterminism about culture.

18 Marshall Sahlins called this ‘negative reciprocity.’ See Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine 1972), 195-6.

19 Quoted in Sahlins, 200.

20 I am eliciting the intuitions that are part of our shared ethical culture, not making a practical judgment of my own about what to do. In Normative Ethics Kagan points out that common sense morality will require us to spend money on rescue even if that money would do more good spent otherwise (134). Singer (in correspondence) bites the consequentialist bullet and says that while we would shudder at the sort of person who would walk past the child, she does the right thing. Here again (see note 13) he gives an answer that is wildly at variance with our ethical culture, but since he regards himself as an ethical reformer, that does not bother him. But should it? I think it should because his a-theoretical argument for an obligation to assist appeals to our current ethical culture for its force, not to utilitarianism.

This is Singer's quandary: he is a utilitarian who wishes to use an a-theoretical argument for an obligation to aid victims of absolute poverty; he assumes that this a-theoretical argument is compatible with his commitment to utilitarianism as the fundamental practical imperative. I have argued that it is not, that the logic of the drowning child example at the center of his argument is non-utilitarian. If he embraces his utilitarianism, he undercuts his argument for an obligation to assist. Cullity (again in correspondence) agrees that Libby should save the child, but writes that his view as developed on 121 of the Ethics article acknowledges this. (The reader may judge for herself whether what Cullity says there is sufficient to justify rescuing the child, given the rest of his argument — I doubt it.) Cullity wishes to preserve more of our current ethical culture than Singer does. Still, the argument of this and the previous section rebuts his argument to a general reason to aid others.

23 Unemployment in Kerala is 25%, the highest of any state in India. While unemployment there has historically always been higher, it is possible that the radical reforms in Kerala have raised wage rates and taxes to the point where there is a disincentive for capital investment there, despite the educated workforce. See Richard W. Franke and Barbara H. Chasin, Kerala: Radical Reform as Development in an Indian State, 2nd ed. (Oakland, CA: Food First 1994), 67-70 for a discussion of the problem of unemployment. The suggestion that radical reform has led to capital flight or avoidance of Kerala is mine, not theirs. But in a recent article about Kerala in The Chicago Tribune Uli Schmetzer writes, ‘Despite its educated working class and functional infrastructure, foreign investors shun the communist stronghold, afraid of its militant unions and Marxist ideology. Investors prefer cheap labor markets elsewhere’ (Tribune for 16 January 2000, Section 1, p. 6: ‘“The Other India” Harvests Fruits of a Communist Rule’).

24 We must be prepared as well to answer arguments that our knowledge is so limited that any response we attempt may make the problem worse. And if we cannot answer that point of view, we may have to acknowledge that, on grounds yet different from Sidgwick's or the Malthusian's, we need not concern ourselves with trying to help. Really, there are many responses that could seem reasonable, given how one understands the world and what acts would lead to what consequences.

25 ‘But surely this comment grounds a criticism of our ethical life! So your views are akin to the philanthropists'.’ Yes and no. Like them, I am critical of our ethical culture, but for the Marxist the criticism is grounded in (class) interest, not logic or ‘morality.’ This idea of Marx and Engels is expressed especially in the first hundred pages of The German Ideology in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works volume 5 (New York: International Publishers 1976).

26 The Expanding Circle (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1981)

27 Ethics 104 (1994) 536-57, at 546-9

28 See above, where I point out that one could respond to the Malthusian that his point about the effects of aid is irrelevant: ‘I am not trying to address poverty; the issue is not whether assistance makes poverty worse in the long run. I am only trying to help people who need help.’ The philanthropists and others do not respond in this way because they are vexed by the suffering and premature death from poverty.

29 Singer offers this as a proposal at the end of Chapter 8 of Practical Ethics. In ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality,’ he cites St. Thomas to the effect that there is a Christian duty to give superfluous wealth away to the poor.

30 For the point about hegemony see ‘Can a Partisan Be a Moralist?’ American Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1990) 71-9, explicitly at 77 but implicitly throughout.

31 Cited in note 14. Normative identities and the problems and changes in them are also described in an unpublished essay ‘Can We Overcome Racial Division? On Group Identity and Self-Interest’ (available from me electronically). The rationality of changing from a parochial group-centered identity to a more universal normative conception is discussed in ‘Universalism and Optimism’ (see note 27 for reference). The connection to Hegel is developed in ‘Hegel on History and Freedom’ in Thomas Powers and Paul Kamolnick, edsv From Kant to Weber: Freedom and Culture in Classical German Social Theory (Melbourne, FL: Krieger 1999).

32 See note 2 for reference.

33 This idea is further developed in relation to a Marxist conception of history in ‘Marxism and Rationality,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 26 (1989) 53-62. The paper on racial division (note 31) implicitly criticizes the too narrow notion of self-interest that was assumed in ‘Marxism and Rationality’ and ‘Consequentialism and History,’ arguing that the notions of the self and hence of self-interest are normative; it attacks the Hobbesian idea of morality depending on interest, arguing that interest itself is a normative conception.

34 An objection: ‘But surely you can't blame that on the philanthropist assimilation. You just admitted that we can do both, rescue victims of a flood while addressing the causes of flooding.’ In reply: The task of ‘rescue’ (relief of poverty) is so immense (and by the philanthropist assimilation it has priority) that the philanthropist never gets around to addressing causes. Ironically, the exception is the discussion of Malthusianism, one of the more implausible accounts of the cause of poverty.

35 This is from FAO press releases of September and October 2000 available at www.fao.org/WAICENT/OIS/PRESS.NE/PRESSENG/^OOO/prenOOSO.htmand /pren0056.htm.

36 Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins, and Peter Rosset, World Hunger: Twelve Myths 2nd ed. (New York: Grove Press 1998), 61. It should be noted that the world's population increased more than 11% in these years, so the percentage who are hungry declined. According to the FAO the total number of hungry may have dropped in the late 1990s: they report 828 million hungry in the developing nations 1994-96, 792 million hungry in the developing nations 1996-98. Nevertheless, the huge gap between food production growth and any marginal declines in hunger

37 In ‘Poverty and Food: Why Charity is not Enough’ in Brown and Shue (see note 13 for reference), Thomas Nagel writes that hunger is the result of a ‘system of political and economic institutions,’ a remark congenial to the suggestion here. The discussion that follows is about capitalism and access to food, food being the main topic of philosophical discussion. But poverty creates other devastations, most recently the AIDS pandemic of subsaharan Africa. Capitalist social relations have disrupted traditional family life and sexual practices through the growth of migrant labor, which typically separates men from their wives. This migrant labor system is deeply implicated in African AIDS. So the discussion that follows here about capitalism and food could be supplemented by a discussion about capitalism and AIDS.

38 Nagel's ‘Poverty and Food’ suggests a redistributive tax to guarantee a social minimum internationally (57-8). Thomas W. Pogge's ‘A Global Resource Dividend’ in Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global Stewardship, David A. Crocker and Toby Linden, eds. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 1998) develops that idea, calling it a ‘dividend’ (to imply a right to the wealth from resources) and suggesting that it not be considered redistributive but rather part of fundamental just distribution. But neither Nagel nor Pogge consider undoing the economic order creating poverty. This omission is crucial. The norms of that economic order construct their own conceptions of justice and injustice. If the norms governing market transactions create poverty as a perfectly ‘just’ outcome of their own working, then one might wonder how readily people will agree that the creation of poverty is an injustice. By the lights of those norms taxes are a seizure of someone's property and the resources are already privately owned; any dividends should go to those resources’ owners. Hence, the distribution proposed by Nagel or Pogge is, I am suggesting, based on norms that are at war with one another. This conflict of norms makes it unlikely that their proposals will be persuasive.

39 Amartya Sen has used the word ‘entitlements’ in this broad sense; see, for example, his Poverty and Famines in The Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze Omnibus (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999).

40 The Evolution of Political Society (New York: Random House 1967), 186

41 Since Fried wrote there has been much more written specifically on societies on the cusp of statehood. See, for example, Timothy Earle, How Chiefs Come to Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997). Some of my unpublished work (available from me electronically: <p-gomberg@csu.edu>) analyzes the instability of chiefdoms on the cusp of exploitation and command.

42 Here again there is a much literature, but a classical argument on redistribution is Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, especially the essay ‘On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange.'

43 Philip McMichael, Development and Social Change (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press 1996), 95 & 179-80; also Enzo Mingione and Enrico Pugliese, ‘Rural Subsistence, Migration, Urbanization, and the New Global Food Regime’ in From Columbus to Con-Agra, Alessandro Bonanno, Lawrence Busch, William H. Friedland, Lourdes Gjouveia, and Enzo Mingione, eds. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press 1994), 52-68

44 On the percentage without land see Lappé et al., 66 and International Labor Organization 1996 press release for report Agricultural Wage Workers: The Poorest of the Rural Poor ILO/96/26 at www.ilo.org. The quote from the Ugandan farmer is from Lappé et al., 17. On the effect of the Green Revolution and food aid see Lappé et al., 58-65, 129-43; McMichael, 68-71. The most powerful attack on food aid is Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (New York: The Free Press 1997).

45 Africa ships to Europe not only fruits and vegetables, beverages, timber, sugar cane, peanuts, hemp, and cotton, but also flowers. See Barbara Dinham and Colin Hines, Agribusiness in Africa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press 1984), 30-3; William H. Friedland, ‘The New Globalization: The Case of Fresh Produce’ in Bonanno et al., 214-17.

46 See David Barkin, Rosemary L. Batt, and Billie R. DeWalt, Food Crops vs. Feed Crops: Global Substitution of Grains in Production (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner 1990), 43-9 and Lappé et al., 110.

47 Barkin et al. detail this process for Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Egypt, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, and others. The figure on undernourished children and food surpluses is from Lappé et al., 9.

48 On the grain conglomerates see William D Heffernan and Douglas H. Constance, ‘Transnational Corporations and the Globalization of the Food System’ in Bonanno et al., 29-51. On the contract or ‘outgrower’ system where local small farmers retain title to land while power and consequent wealth go to agricultural corporations see Dinham and Hines, 31 and Lappé et al., 112. Contract systems also enable compliance with land reforms laws while the essence does not change. Part of agricultural overproduction is the substitution of one crop for another, for example, the substitution of corn sweeteners for sugar cane and of enzyme-engineered ‘cocoa butter equivalents’ for cocoa. See Waiden Bello, Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty (London: Pluto Press 1994), 25.

49 The story of Rwanda is told in Lappé et al., 21-3 and more fully in Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty: Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms (Penang, Malasia: Third World Network 1997), 111-20. The quote from Chossudovsky is from 115. The second quote is from Lappé et al., 23.

50 Lappé et al., 9-10

51 For the story of Structural Adjustment Programs imposed by the IMF and World Bank see Bellow, Dark Victory; Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty; and Biplab Dasgupta, Structural Adjustment, Global Trade, and the New Political Economy of Development (London: Zed Books 1998). These books document the devastating effect of structural adjustment, but the argument here is that it just accelerates processes that are already at work as a result of ordinary market capitalism.

52 Angus Wright's The Death of Ramon Gonzalez: The Modern Agricultural Dilemma (Austin: University of Texas Press 1990) is useful for its many interviews with scientists, government officials, and businessmen, giving a flavor of how the actors in contemporary agriculture think. Perhaps most striking are a few pages where he describes an evening he and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal spent as guests of a grower and his associates from the Culiacan Valley, an area of intense cultivation for export. One of the businessmen became angry and defensive, challenging the host, ‘you don't understand about these bastards [the guests].’ Wright was asked about the reporter, ‘Where did you get this Jewish prick?’ One businessman asked, ‘Aren't you afraid to come down here where we kill gringos who get in our way?’ then added, ‘No, don't worry, we're not going to kill you’ (188-9). But those of us who lived through the Vietnam War are aware that there can be powerful and brutal resistance to social reform, including land reform that would break up large holdings.

53 We could go further than the text proposes; we could put all entitlements to material goods outside the framework of the market, indeed make all material entitlements independent of individual effort. For some defense of this see Progressive Labor Party, Road to Revolution IV (Brooklyn, NY: Progressive Labor Party 1982 [GPO Box 808, Brooklyn, NY 11202]; also available at www.plp.org).

54 Many believe that the history of the twentieth century shows that radical alternatives to capitalist social relations are hopeless. Here the literature is huge, ranging from abstract arguments from the tradition of Austrian economics that planned economies are hopelessly inefficient to more concretely grounded assessments that planned economies do not respond to human needs to arguments that any effort to plan out human social relations slights the real needs of real people. For an alternative assessment of the experience of twentieth century socialism, one that holds out the prospect that humans can, in a modern society, organize direct relationships of mutual regard and responsibility, see Road to Revolution IV and Road to Revolution III (Brooklyn, NY: Progressive Labor Party 1971); available online at www.plp.org.

55 Xizhe Peng, ‘Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward/ Population and Development Review 13 (1987) 639-70 contains this estimate of excess mortality. Peng develops some of the factors that may have led to a collapse of grain produc tion in China during those years. The Great Leap Forward was not a single unified social experiment. It contained both egalitarian elements (distribution according to need on large communes) and elements oriented toward expansion of industrial production. (Peng cites, for example, the transfer of a large number of workers from agricultural to industrial production.) I believe that a close examination of the evidence would show that the latter were implicated in the grain shortages, not the former.

56 Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989), 215

57 A suggestion of Cullity's in correspondence. The issue here is different from the one raised in note 34, where we were discussing the implications of the philanthropist assimilation. Here we assume the consequentialist goal of doing the most possible to combat poverty. Should we do both, aid victims and address causes? 58 Seven years ago Shelly Kagan read an ancestor paper and offered extensive (and pretty devastating) criticisms that led to a reformulation of the argument along the lines developed here. Thomas Pogge, Garrett Cullity, Peter Singer, and two reviewers for CJP made exhaustive comments that led to many revisions. Peter Unger offered encouragement. John Deigh, Bernard Walker, and Emmett Bradbury commented on earlier drafts. The paper was the subject of a Philosophy Department colloquium at Bowling Green State University; thanks to Marina Oshana, Loren Lomasky, David Copp, Chris Morris, Marvin Beizer, and others there for their hospitality and comments.