We Don’t Owe Them a Thing!: A Tough-Minded but Soft-Hearted View of Aid to the Faraway Needy

The discovery that people far away are in bad shape seems to generate a sense of guilt on the part of many articulate people in our ("wealthy") part of the world, even though they are no worse off now that we've heard about them than they had been before. I will take it as given that we are certainly responsible for evils we inflict on others, no matter where, and that we owe those people compensation. Not all similarly agree that it is not in general our duty to make other people better off, and therefore not in general our fault when people are not better off than they happen to be, even if perhaps we could have made them so by efforts of our own. Nevertheless, I have seen no plausible argument that we owe something, as a matter of general duty, to those to whom we have done nothing wrong. Still, morally commendable motives of humanity and sympathy support beneficence, and if we wish to call those "duties," there is something to be said for that, too. I shall, in fact, try to say it later in this essay. A further clarificatory point is in order: I also take it that if we did have any such duties, they would not be, as such, to people who are merely "worse off than ourselves." Americans don't owe anything to Canadians or Englishmen, even though Americans have a higher real income. Our subject, I presume, is people who are, by some reasonable criterion, badly off, and not merely worse off than we. It is not clear how we would identify this reasonable criterion, but I will assume that there are plausible answers; a duty to needy people, if we had one, would be to try to get them up to that relevant standard, rather than to a condition of equality with ourselves. I will say no more about egalitarianism here.1