Pakistani troops from MONUC (United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo) in Uvira, DR Congo.

Most current discussions of international development assume that the wealthier nations of the world owe something to the inhabitants of the more impoverished regions of the globe. The disagreements, it seems, are over the precise nature of the moral demand in question. There is no consensus on what evils are the most urgent – whether it is poverty, for example, or political oppression that ought to be our primary focus. There is still less agreement on what means might best be employed to produce those desired outcomes. These discussions are necessary, and we are right to take them as our primary focus. This present article, though, asks a simpler question: Why should we regard a wealthier state as having any moral duties to citizens abroad? We might understand this question as a skeptical challenge to the concept of development assistance itself. Addressing it might provide us with some guidance in determining what sorts of development aid are the most morally defensible. Before we can decide what we owe, we ought to first understand why anything is owed at all.

Three possible answers to this skeptical challenge are present, in more or less explicit forms, in the current philosophical literature. I will not attempt here to determine which of them is the most persuasive; I will restrict myself to identifying the possible benefits and pitfalls attached to these strategies. The arguments can be summarized as those coming from causation, consistency, and territory. In the end, the moral demands of international development might be usefully grounded in any one of these responses – or, perhaps, some combination of the three. The first argument looks at the concrete effects of our political acts abroad; the second, at the nature of the moral claims we take to animate domestic politics; and the final, at the limited territorial reach of a legal state.

Causation and International Poverty

The argument from causation notes that international underdevelopment is not a problem whose origin is in unavoidable natural facts. Instead, the explanation for poverty rests in a complex set of empirical facts, some of which place responsibility for poverty on the actions of wealthier states. One version of this argument examines the legacy of colonialism, and notes how the legacy of imperial projects contributes to the present lack of effective governance in formerly colonized states. A more abstract version looks to the international system of trade rules and treaty laws, noting that it seems that this system constitutes a coercively maintained structure by which wealthier nations exploit and perpetuate the conditions in less developed states. What these arguments share is a notion that international poverty is not a natural evil in the world, but a phenomenon whose existence can be partly traced to policies and decisions made by Western states. Causal responsibility, in this analysis, creates moral responsibility; the evils we have created are the evils we must overcome.

These arguments are potentially powerful, and ground our obligation to others on a moving and intuitive notion of responsibility. However, there are two potential drawbacks to this approach. The first is that it makes our moral duties rest upon empirical analyses, on whose truth we may well find no agreement. In this instance, moral philosophy waits upon the findings of development economics, and refuses to grant rights to the impoverished where we cannot establish that the appropriate form of causal relationship exists. We are right to worry about an approach that makes our duties contingent in this manner. The second difficulty of this argument relates closely to the first. In making our duties look backwards to causation, rather than forward to considerations of effectiveness and need, we would sometimes be urged to do less good in the world rather than more. Where we are called upon to take care of the problems we have created, we are thereby called upon to choose based upon past causation, rather than the concrete needs of individual persons abroad.

Imagine, for instance, two impoverished nations, one whose poverty is best explained as the result of natural factors in geography and climate, and one whose poverty is in some way causally related to a legacy of colonialism in which the West is complicit. The argument from causation might end up giving the West stronger duties to help the citizens of the latter nation – even if, perhaps, the inhabitants of the former nation are significantly more disadvantaged. It is not clear that this is not, in the end, a defensible action. Nevertheless this argument entails that we do less good for the world than we otherwise might do, were we to focus instead upon the claims of absolute need. While this approach has much to recommend, it often endorses policies whose moral acceptability might be problematic.

Consistency and Moral Principle

The second approach rests upon a powerful moral notion grounded on Western political thought: the equality of persons. Liberal political theory rests upon the belief that all human beings are alike in moral standing, and ought to be treated as moral equals by the political institutions affecting their lives. This view stands in tension with the fact that arbitrary borders mark the difference between wealth and poverty. We might borrow a phrase from Joseph Carens, and note that citizenship in a wealthy country resembles feudal birthright privilege, an undeserved privilege stemming from lucky birth. Given that our political theory generally condemns the idea that accidents of birth may determine life chances, can we consistently accept the idea that those born into poverty abroad must suffer simply because of where they happen to have been born?

This argument has a great deal of power to it, and resonates with the moral egalitarianism that makes liberalism an attractive political theory. Liberalism, in the sense used here, is simply a set of principles and policies guaranteeing equality of persons before the state; applying this same equality across states gives us a coherent vision of politics, at home and abroad. The most important drawback to note, however, is that it may seem to go too far in establishing duties to foreign citizens, which, in the process, robs itself of plausibility. To put it in the simplest terms, we cannot consistently treat non-citizens the same as citizens without depriving the notion of citizenship of its content and power. International equality taken at face value would insist that every state would has the duty to treat every human being with equal concern and respect. This would seem practically difficult, to say the least, but also implausible as a grounding for development assistance. What we need is a program which insists upon the moral equality of persons, yet acknowledges that what is owed to foreign individuals is substantively distinct from what is owed to domestic citizens. It is possible to imagine such a program – states able to give aid to foreign citizens, for example, may be required to do so, as this duty may be an analogue to the domestic notion of political equality. However, more philosophical work is needed before we can come to a concrete conclusion. Such work should not, of course, take the place of practical action internationally; whatever is owed, it likely includes more than we currently provide. Nonetheless, it is of value to understand what our moral duties entail, and further analysis is needed before we have a picture of such duties capable of gaining widespread assent.