Submitted by TuvixWasMurderedR1P t3_yd1jb3 in philosophy
whodo-i-thinkiam t1_itpocno wrote
>Peter Singer argues that individuals should do more to alleviate the world’s poverty
The reason these kinds of statements are empty platitudes is because people like Singer aren't saying individuals should be required to alleviate the world's poverty, through enforceable laws or policies, but rather they should choose to alleviate the world's poverty, freely, which of course many won't do. In the subtext of normative statements like these from liberal, utilitarian thinkers is the absence of enforcement. Enforcement of social norms and moral values (like, one should not hoard wealth and resources at the expense of others) throughout a society or culture is illiberal, as it necessarily means the limiting of individual freedoms and rights, like the right to property and wealth accumulation.
TuvixWasMurderedR1P OP t1_itpq9bh wrote
Also, what do you do in a system that regularly generates incentives to NOT give to charity? I'm not against charity, but to propose it as a systemic way to address poverty is ridiculous.
glass_superman t1_itpugc6 wrote
Even more ridiculous: Charity has existed for literally thousands of years and has yet to solve poverty. Yet people hold on to the notion that this will eventually work.
When? Are we half way done with the project of eradicating poverty? Or is it just another 2000 years perhaps?
EdgyZigzagoon t1_itpxfnn wrote
We’re well over halfway there. The number of people living in extreme poverty today is lower than it has been in hundreds of years (when it represented the majority of the worlds population). In terms of percentages, it has fallen from 80% in 1820 to 20% in 2015 thanks to large scale globalization and international relief organizations.
Unfortunately, research has consistently found that most Americans (and likely other first world inhabitants) are ignorant of the vast progress made in reducing world poverty, many even believing that it has increased. Better communication is necessary so that people who live in a first world bubble remain connected to the progress that has happened and continue to be motivated to finish the job by contributing (individually and via their government) to NGOs on the ground actually working to improve lives around the world.
https://www.humanprogress.org/what-19-in-20-americans-dont-know-about-world-poverty/
https://books.google.com/books?id=j-4yDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/ending-poverty
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/world/global-poverty-united-nations.html
glass_superman t1_itq65as wrote
It's not surprising that people would guess wrong because their basis for what counts as extreme poverty is probably inflated.
Ask those same people if they would consider themselves impoverished on $1000/year and they'd probably almost all say yes. And they'd be wrong there, too, according to the "experts".
Edit: BTW, your link is funded by the libertarian Koch brothers, for whom the current system has been wildly beneficial. How convenient for them that so much progress has been made under the system that has also made them billionaires! The countenance of your sources is dubious, dude!
VitriolicViolet t1_itsk3b0 wrote
also forgetting the vast majority of that poverty reduction was the Chinese government lifting over 1 billion out of poverty.
remove the Chinese and suddenly the world has made minimal progress, funny how the 1 nation the West couldnt bully into submission is also the one that managed to become rich off of globalization (India went the route of allowing Western corporations to control their political parties, as did most of the 3rd world)
glass_superman t1_itsqy4r wrote
Ah, good point!
EdgyZigzagoon t1_itq6i2x wrote
As long as the measurement is consistent, it’s still a good measurement. If you think the threshold is too low, that makes it even more of an issue that 10% of the worlds population still falls below it, and our efforts should be focused on helping those who need help most first.
By the way, making $1000/year would put you in the top 20% in the world in income, further highlighting the need for increasing investment in global economic development. Development of strong market economies is the single biggest predictor of reducing poverty in a nation.
If you’d like to learn more about how the line is chosen and what we need to do to continue the fight against world poverty, I would encourage you to read this article: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
glass_superman t1_itqb7tl wrote
>, further highlighting the need for increasing investment in global economic development. Development of strong market economies is the single biggest predictor of reducing poverty in a nation.
That's true in the neoliberal order but why must we have the neoliberal order?
Isn't that the point of this article? To search for solutions to poverty beyond the neoliberal order and not within it? Because within it we are claim success at having only 80% of the world earning less than $1000/day or whatever. That doesn't sound very successful to me at all!
EdgyZigzagoon t1_itq842d wrote
Did you mean provenance?
I have added sources from the United Nations and New York Times which expand upon the issue, you’re right that it’s good to examine the data from multiple sources. In this case, the data is reliable and you will be able to find it yourself from many more sources if you’re still in doubt.
glass_superman t1_itq95zk wrote
(Oops, it's still very early in my time zone. My bad!)
I still wonder if the people who had the wrong impression of the number of people in poverty also had the wrong definition of poverty. We should use measures more universal, like, "How many people per years will experience hunger as pain?" Saying that someone earning $3/day isn't in poverty doesn't speak to me at all!
EdgyZigzagoon t1_itq9xc6 wrote
I agree with you in principle, but it’s also a massive success that the number of people with even less than that has fallen so dramatically. And obviously, $3/day means different things in different places. Ultimately, the number of people starving, the number of people who are absolutely destitute, and rates of child mortality have all dropped sharply, and that should be celebrated and the work should be continued.
I think it makes the most sense to contextualize poverty in terms of the quality of life and security that comes with alleviating it, which is what organizations who study it attempt to do far better than either of us ever could, which is why they deserve huge amounts of funding and support.
We probably agree on 80% of things at the end of the day, I just like to encourage people to be a little more optimistic because we have done great things and if we continue to work hard we can continue to make the world a better place. I have to go actually do my job now lmao, peace out.
TuvixWasMurderedR1P OP t1_itq03nw wrote
Will it be any real consolation for people to hear that they’re better off than we’re the medieval peasants?
Also, many studies have shown that this pandemic reduced a lot of these gains that had taken a century or so to accumulate. And with the current monetary policies of the US and European central banks, we’re going to see in-debt developing countries fall into a chasm of debt so deep that it’ll look pretty much impossible to overcome.
The system is not resilient.
EdgyZigzagoon t1_itq0tyb wrote
Extreme poverty has halved in the last 20 years, 2000 is hardly medieval, in fact the dismissal of those in extreme poverty around the world like that is a major obstacle in continuing to improve global conditions for the most poor. Source on global extreme poverty increasing to 20th century levels during the pandemic?
Edit:
You are right that there was an increase, my mistake, of about 1.5 percentage points from 8.4 percent of the world population to 9.9 percent living in extreme poverty.
This is a massive tragedy to those 140 million people, and I don’t want to minimize that. That being said, you hugely overstated the matter, and the increase in poverty regressed us to 2016, not 1922.
With the global resurgence and reopening of international free trade following the pandemic progress will be able to resume and continue towards the goal of 5% by 2030. Over 1/2 of those living in extreme poverty live in just a handful of nations, so focusing aid and development projects on those nations should allow the efforts of organizations working in this field to continue to save lives and reduce human suffering.
I would encourage you to learn anything at all about actual policies that can be supported to reduce world poverty. While simple ideological dogma can be tempting and comforting, doing real work to help real people is complicated and difficult, and requires complicated solutions. Champagne Socialists can rail against institutions for being imperfect all they want, they are imperfect, but I am more impressed by the people who work hard to improve lives as effectively as they can regardless of imperfect circumstances, who don’t let ideals become the enemy of progress.
SalmonApplecream t1_itrrv68 wrote
lol what? If everyone was charitable it would get rid of these problems
glass_superman t1_itrx5y0 wrote
Big if! How are you going to get everyone to be charitable?
Jesus, super famous, with the Bible, super famous, has a an entire religion, said that we should help the poor, his ideas have been around 2000 years. Still, we have poverty.
You're telling me that Peter Singer is going to do a better job of getting everyone on board? He's going to be more influential than Jesus?
SalmonApplecream t1_itrxhrx wrote
I don’t know, but it’s probably easier than setting up a socialist utopia. Poverty, disease, war etc is decreasing year on year.
I just find it silly to criticise someone who has actually massively changed the world, because they didn’t make it perfect overnight
shumpitostick t1_itpstm5 wrote
That's not true that his only focus is on individual actions though. In his Animal Liberation, there's a whole section of the book where he talks about the mostly unnecessary cruelty of Animal Experimentation, and how it should be solved by advocacy and changing the laws. The Effective Altruism movement for with Singer is considered to be somewhat of an ideological father, uses advocacy, grassroots movements, lobbying, etc in a variety of issues.
However, in some issues individual action can be the best way. Some issues, like Veganism for example that Singer is an advocate of, do not have enough public support at this point to change laws and policies. Same with poverty alleviation. I'm sure pretty much everybody in the movement would be happy to see countries give foreign aid in the forms that have been shown to be effective. However countries generally see foreign aid as a tool to buy influence and that's unlikely to change soon.
Amphy64 t1_itpxp5t wrote
Disagree, I think in the UK we easily have sufficient public support for veganism, and at absolute minimum for welfare legislation that would have the inevitable effect of drastically reducing then likely eliminating meat consumption, it's the actions and practical understanding that haven't caught up. It's an edgelord minority willing to look at animal ag. and go 'this is fine', very few think or want to say that.
shumpitostick t1_itqfnyu wrote
Are you vegan? Because honestly I think you're a bit naive about the public support for animal welfare. There are quite a lot of people who don't give a single shit about animal welfare. They're not the deciding factors when it comes to this kind of politics though. It's the farmers. Farmers are one of the strongest lobby groups in most countries and they oppose anything that hurts their bottom line. I'm from Israel, we have the highest percentage of vegans in the world and we had a big campaign a while ago to stop importing livestock (they would suffer a lot on the trip). The campaign failed.
I'm not saying that you can't find public support for some animal welfare policies, and many groups in the Effective Altruism space do work on that, but it's usually stuff like "hey maybe you can't keep this chicken in an individual cage where she literally can't move and instead put her in a cage with other chickens where she maybe will be able to take a few steps without stepping into another chicken". We're very far from like, banning slaughterhouses.
tomvorlostriddle t1_itprfp2 wrote
>The reason these kinds of statements are empty platitudes is because people like Singer aren't saying individuals should be
>
>required
>
>to alleviate the world's poverty, through enforceable laws or policies, but rather they should
>
>choose
>
>to alleviate the world's poverty, freely, which of course many won't do
Lawmakers are people too.
Acts to vote for new laws are acts just like following those laws are acts and like doing charity despite the absence of such laws are acts as well.
Rule utilitarianism is the default unless explicitly stated otherwise. Because you would need to justify why of all possible actions, those who consist of establishing rules should be set out of scope. They are just actions that need to be assessed by their expected consequences, like all other actions.
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