outsidein »

• On global migration

  April 21, 2010 @ 2:56 pm | by Bryan

  The topic that seems to generate the most response on this blog is immigration. That makes sense, I suppose. There aren’t too many fora out there that facilitate a back and forth between those who are concerned about the consequences of immigration (imagined and real), and immigrants themselves, or those who view immigration in a positive light.

  Although I often refer to the issue, I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly spelt out my own position. Here goes:

  Like most of you, I remember my parents’ painstaking attempts to get me to understand the difference between right and wrong. One of the main pillars of this concept was the idea of fairness. There is something about the fact that just about anyone on one end of the world can visit, or relocate to most parts of the other, while only a very small proportion of the latter can even visit the former, that violates that basic sense of fairness. As I got older, I was taught that life isn’t fair, but that it ought to be just. I was taught that fairness would mean every time my sister got a doll I should get one too, whether or not I ‘deserved’ or even wanted one. Justice, on the other hand, meant that the same concern shown to her would be shown to me. We would be treated in a similar manner, based on consistent principles, and shown the same love, even if that meant sometimes one got gifts, rewards, privileges or duties that the other did not.

  That the rules governing global migration are unfair is in my opinion uncontroversial; they obviously are. That just makes them consistent with life, and I can happily live with that. What I struggle with is the fact that they are also unjust. What has the average Irish person done to deserve the option to visit or relocate to a bunch of different countries should she so wish that the average Tswana, Peruvian or Bangladeshi has not?

  The highly influential political philosopher John Rawls believed the answer lies in political culture. His answer in The Law of Peoples, sounds like a version of a conservative American politician’s self-help, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, take-responsibility philosophy. The Tswana, Peruvian and Bangladeshi, by this account, need to sort out the political culture in their country because all countries have the resources to reach a satisfactory level of ‘development’, and then they won’t have to migrate. Not only can they then stay put, but once they no longer pose the risk of not returning to their own place of origin, rich countries will grant them the privilege of visiting and spending their money on said rich countries’ tourism sector. I’ve added to it, but that seems to me to be Rawls’ general point, and it’s one that many, maybe most people in the rich world, share.

  I’m all for personal responsibility. And should an individual, a group, or a national culture have negative consequences, then it’s perfectly just to let them have to deal with those consequences. But I struggle to understand how anyone who has ever paid any attention to the world beyond their front door can believe that a nation’s condition is solely, even primarily the result of its culture. Take Ireland for example. It hasn’t been a closed system in which the only things that have really mattered to its trajectory have been internal. Nations are open systems, and a lot of national culture comes about as a result of external influences. And then, as Thomas Pogge brilliantly highlights, the global political economy is such that with all the will in the world, few nations can pursue the policies they want without first taking note of the external environment.

  Maybe that’s where the fork in the road lies with respect to migration and global justice more broadly. Some see the matter as predominantly local while others think the international context is decisive. That most of the former are the beneficiaries of the status quo and the latter the losers is telling of human nature, and that probably cuts both ways.

  So, if the material benefits of human labour are unevenly, and unjustly distributed, if the same is also true of natural resources, such that some places give up the resources around and beneath them for much less benefit than that accrued by those who take them, why shouldn’t people be allowed to follow the wealth? I completely understand and empathise with the concerns that some have over the effects of ‘mass migration’, but frankly, I think the right to follow the world’s resources trumps those concerns (empirical studies show that the average American consumes something like 6 times his share of the planet, the average European 4, and the African less than her full share).

  The real issue, of course, is global distributive and regulatory justice. But until that’s addressed, I can’t see there being a plausible moral argument against the right of the poor to follow their share of planet.

  Comments (21)

• To care, or not to care?

  March 3, 2010 @ 9:35 pm | by Bryan

  A friend kindly sent me a link to a story about the plight of Zimbabwean children in the face of the country’s social and economic meltdown. On a different day, I’d be tempted – as entertainingly as possible so as not to come across as a dull, liberal bore – to make some point about the ethical significance of the quality of life disparity between the Zimbabwean child in Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwean child in the Diaspora, and the average European child. But since we’ve already established that we generally don’t care about the plight of hundreds of missing foreign children, why bother?

  Instead, I’m going to ask a different type of ethical question. Western liberal societies tend to project a certain ethical standard; one that, among other things, prioritises human rights, individual freedom, the equality of all people, and so forth. But is that really what the people who make up these societies believe? Or when push comes to shove, when upholding those liberal values comes to cost us something, are we all Hobbesians who believe that the state of nature is a war of all against all? Are we really pragmatic Darwinists who believe in the concept of natural selection and survival of the fittest?

  Is the answer anything but academic? I think it is. If the liberal rhetoric that we freely espouse is no more substantive than a politician’s election promises, then paying any heed to it is at best, silly. Besides, my new year’s resolution to not Bug Out includes not repeating and trying to build arguments based on make-believe.

  If that is the case, if there isn’t really a moral code, at least not one that so-called liberal societies really hold to, if the state of nature really is a war of all against all, then perhaps it is time to stop behaving as though the plight of Zimbabwean children, or the disappearance of hundreds of minors from Irish state care, matters in the slightest?

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• Why we aren’t bothered

  February 28, 2010 @ 11:42 pm | by Bryan

  Breda O’Brien’s disturbing article, What happened to all the missing foreign children? demands, I think, an answer. She asks:

  Are we, as Phil Garland, HSE assistant national director for children and families, suggested, simply racist? … I can only imagine the resources that would be marshalled and the blanket media coverage if Irish children whom I teach went missing. Between 2000 and 2009 a total of 501 migrant children went missing from HSE care. Only 67 have been successfully traced.

  How is it that hundreds of children disappear from the state’s care, and almost no-one takes any notice? Does this simply boil down to racism or some variation of it? Or is it something else; the outworking of the same phenomenon that makes the death of a few individuals in The United States or Western Europe considerably more news worthy than the deaths of scores of poor rural Asians or Africans? The outworking of an accepted, albeit rarely acknowledged human life value index? The same index which confers some missing children and their families near celebrity status while leaving others in their anonymity?

  Maybe what’s really at work has more to do with the same things that allowed children to be abused by priests for so many years. Could it be that Irish culture, like many traditional African cultures, has an aversion to the discussion of unpleasant topics? Maybe, for the sake of ‘peace’, or something like that, we just don’t like to disturb the many with the difficulties of a few? And perhaps the secular variant of that culture is what informs the prevailing attitude towards gang violence, and criminality in general: provided it is contained, so long as it does not spill over into the nice parts of town or affect innocent people – while it remains out of sight in other words – we seem to be perfectly capable of living with the scourge.

  Before we collectively lost our minds, before power and the pursuit of material gain intoxicated much of Zimbabwe, people generally held the view that life was sacred. For some, this went so far as to believe that the lack of respect for the sanctity of life leads to all sorts of calamities, personal and collective, ranging from natural disasters like drought, to things like financial ruin.

  That a lack of respect for human life leads to ruin has been upheld in Zimbabwe. I think the same can be said for Ireland. Had the nation taken time out from its frenzied pursuit of development, progress, and wealth in order to look for missing children, to deal with allegations of clerical abuse, to focus on crime and the factors that give rise to criminality, and the like; had the priorities been different, who knows? There may never have been a financial collapse, or even a housing bubble for that matter. But as things stand, several hundred missing foreign children aren’t nearly as important as a few hundred potential Ryanair jobs, or speculation on the extent of the dysfunctionality of the FF/Green marriage. Not in Zimbabwe, Ireland, or very many places for that matter.

  That being the case, if the old folks back home are to be believed, we should all brace ourselves for disaster. Or, if you prefer Hobbes:

  Seeing every man, not only by Right, but also by necessity of Nature, is supposed to endeavor all he can, to obtain that which is necessary for his conservation; he that shall oppose himself against it, for things superfluous, is guilty of the war that thereupon is to follow.

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• Arbitrary citizenship

  February 12, 2010 @ 10:00 pm | by Bryan

  

  Pamela Izevbekhai was again in the news today. There is a good chance that she and her two children will be deported from Ireland in the not very distant future. Because neither she, nor her daughters were born in Ireland, or in an EU member state, the government has no obligations towards them. They aren’t citizens, so their fate isn’t the concern of Ireland Inc.

  My newborn on the other hand, is an Irish citizen. He was born in here, and his parents had legally resided in the state for the requisite period. Interestingly, had my wife and I had a baby a couple of years earlier, that child would not have qualified for Irish citizenship regardless of his place of birth. Because we waited, he can call himself Irish and the state will agree. That to me seems a little arbitrary.

  Similarly, my American friend who has diligently served his local community for years, leads something of an uncertain life in that every couple of years, he must ask the state for permission to stay put. Although he and his family aren’t reliant on public funds, a favorable decision is not guaranteed. His Irish born daughters on the other hand, are citizens. A day may come when he and his wife are denied permission to live here, while their three young children are allowed to stay. But who is more of a citizen, the parents who are involved with and concerned about their local community, or the children, who probably couldn’t spell the word ‘citizen’, let alone explain what it means?

  I like rules. I’m a fan of order. But I also think that order should be build on the back of rules that both make sense and are just. Pamela Izevbekhai is almost certainly more of a citizen of this country than my child or my friend’s children. She is probably a better citizen of this country than many native Irish people. Even if it were proved that she used dodgy papers and a made up story to get into the state, I’m not convinced that chucking her out while holding on to local criminals, addicts, undesirables of other kinds, my son, or for that matter, any other child in the state, is just.

  The concept of the citizen seems too arbitrary to me, to be entrusted with something as important as who gets let in, who gets to stay, and who gets kicked out.

  Comments (108)

• Pirates

  January 26, 2010 @ 2:46 pm | by Bryan

  Rihanna has released a version of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song in order to raise funds for people in Haiti. As the pop star told Oprah, “This song, for me, any time there was a difficult situation, I always listened to this song. It’s so liberating. Even now, I listen to it when my back is up against the wall. I feel the people of Haiti need to hear something inspiring.” Hmmm….

  Redemption Song is my favorite Bob Marley track. Rita Marley said that her late husband was already in a lot of pain when he wrote it. I don’t know if that pain is what separates the song from others. Or if it’s the simplicity of a man singing with nothing but a guitar to aid him. Or maybe it’s the knowledge that there’s something subversive in the lyrics, even if you don’t know what that something is.

  Years ago, in a dingy room in one of the halls of residence at the University of Zimbabwe, a friend tried to explain to me exactly why those lyrics are subversives. Imagine genuinely believing that someone had literally saved your soul from eternal damnation; pulled you out of ‘the bottomless pit’, so to speak. Imagine then that the same person, minutes later, put you in chains and sold you into a cruel, brutal captivity.

  Old pirates, yes, they rob I;
  Sold I to the merchant ships,
  Minutes after they took I
  From the bottomless pit.

  What does that have to do with Haiti’s earthquake? Simply put, I think you, me, Rihanna and anyone else who can afford to get onto the internet and read this, we’re today’s pirates.

  I once lived in a cockroach infested house. They were invisible most of the time and would only come out after we had all gone to bed. But if you got up in the middle of the night and switched on a light, especially in the kitchen, you would see them scurrying towards the closest hiding place. The response to Haiti’s earthquake reminded me of that house; I felt as though I were seeing the same process, only in reverse. Disaster struck, and where many saw international solidarity and good will, I saw a swarm scurrying onto a vulnerable population for all sorts of reasons – some, genuinely there to help; more for chess-like geopolitical positional advantage; and even more for marketing reasons, in order to gain greater brand exposure and recognition for one’s country, company or organisation. And I suppose it was inevitable: a disaster like that, it was bound to have a huge television audience.

  And let’s be honest, under normal circumstances, who cares about Haiti? Who really cares about it’s history? So what if the French and Americans have plundered and sucked it dry? And if it’s political instability is in good part the result of the meddling of Western countries (including the seemingly benign, like Canada) and institutions like the United Nations?

  What if said meddling leads to your financial gain and mine? Thomas Pogge, in several books and academic papers, argues that if we are involved in, or benefit from institutions that exploit or in other ways harm people, even if those people are on the other side of the world, we are guilty of harming those people and have a duty towards them. Pogge, in my opinion, convincingly makes his point, and he clearly demonstrates the fact that we the global aristocrats – we who don’t worry about whether or not we’ll eat anything tomorrow – do in fact benefit from institutions that harm people in places like Haiti.

  But if we took the likes of Pogge seriously, we couldn’t continue to live as we do. So when Senator David Norris suggested on radio yesterday that people in Ireland may be partially responsible for the situation in Haiti, he was unsurprisingly put in his place by his audience. Not only was he told that the Irish are incredibly generous (the Department of Foreign Affairs have been very busy lately because there has been a lot to say about the Irish government’s response to the earthquake), but what happened in Haiti was a natural disaster. It wasn’t, of course. There may have been an earthquake, but the exaggerated loss of life resulted from the structural failures that led to poor infrastructure and administration in that country. Those structural failures, if you believe Pogge, come back to you and I.

  So what are we to do? We’ll express remorse. We might even learn where the country is on the map. Some will give. Some will give a lot, maybe even of their time. They’ll try to raise funds for the disaster relief, and they may even go to Haiti or other miserable places to help comfort the suffering. But for most of us, something else will capture our attention in the coming months. The World Cup maybe. Or we’ll find out that some other celebrity had an affair. Or a row will erupt over whether bankers should be burdened with an additional tax on their second imported luxury car. Whatever it is, we’ll forget about Haiti until its next disaster.

  Institutionally, the likes of John O’Shea and The Economist will do their best to turn Haiti into a modern day colony, only with benevolent colonial masters. Bill Clinton will probably get another term in office, even if it is a smaller one. Naomi Klein will despair as she watches the process she described in her book unfold. Things will probably go wrong. Poor Haitians are likely to go on being the wretched of the earth (or at the very least, the wretched of the Western Hemisphere). And you and I will be the better for it, even if we oblivious to the workings of the world.

  I wonder if that is what Rihanna had in mind when she decided to fundraise for Haiti with Bob Marley’s song? Probably not. But I’m sure Marley would have seen the irony in the fact that I gain financially from this piece. I too am a pirate.

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• The Drogba effect

  January 13, 2010 @ 11:45 pm | by Bryan

  There was an interesting documentary on TV over the weekend on the history of the noughties from a British perspective. Besides the almost ridiculous self-aggrandisement, it was an incredibly enlightening and thought provoking film.

  One of the things I learnt from it was the term, ‘the Drogba effect’. Didier Drogba is an Ivorian who plays football for Chelsea. As much as it pains me to admit this fact, he is one of the best forwards in the world at the moment. ‘The Drogba effect’ is apparently the effect that foreign born players, like Drogba, have had on the viewership of the English Premier League. It is the richest sport league in the world, most of which is down to global television rights.

  One of the commentators on this documentary compared Drogba to some of the immigrants who have made their way to Britain by means of rickety boats, and other dubious means. He then went on to make the point that in some ways, there isn’t very much that separates Drogba from those illegal immigrants, while in other ways, they literally inhabit different worlds.

  At the risk of beating this issue to death, it got me thinking about John Rawls’ idea of the morally arbitrary. That Drogba is an incredibly talented footballer is morally arbitrary. That he was born into a situation that allowed him to leverage hard work and discipline – or even into a situation that fostered that hard work and discipline – is also in many ways morally arbitrary. That as a global community we esteem football to the level that we do, from the perspective of someone in Drogba’s situation, is in many ways morally arbitrary. He could have been born into the type of situation, and with natural gifts that made him a brilliant goat herder. There would be no such thing as a ‘Drogba effect’ then.

  Thinking about the attack on Togo’s football team in Angola has made the Drogba-anonymous illegal comparison even more grotesque in my mind. There doesn’t seem to be very much separating the perpetrators of that attack from their victims – many of whom, like Drogba, help to bring in billions to a football league worlds apart from where they could have ended up.

  There’s something of a Stephen King quality to the whole thing.

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• Di-Aping, climate change and the Holocaust

  December 21, 2009 @ 8:28 am | by Bryan

  

  [The Copenhagen Accord] asks Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries. It is a solution based on values, the very same values in our opinion that funnelled six million people in Europe into furnaces. – Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping (Chief negotiator for the G77 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen).

  You’ve got to hand it to the Sudanese chair of the G77. Europe is still pretty touchy about the holocaust, and the suggestion that the continent is helping to get the gas chambers cranked up was always going to evoke a response. Di-Aping knows how to make headline grabbing statements, but is there any substance to his charge?

  First of all, there’s the suicide pact stuff. On that, I’m with Di-Aping. The smaller countries don’t really get much consideration (and that’s me trying to be as generous as possible to the rich and powerful ones). Barack Obama didn’t take Malawi, Bangladeshi, a couple of Pacific Island nations and Paraguay into a private room to discuss their grievances. Part of that is Malawi et. al. aren’t responsible for much of the greenhouse gases the world produces so they can’t be expected to be at the forefront of a new green revolution. That said, because they aren’t very well off and don’t have much political clout, the views of Malawi et. al. aren’t going to be seriously considered. Let’s face it, Greenpeace have a better chance of getting a hearing from the Obama administration on the effects of climate change than Malawi. I’m not the only one who thinks as much. According to Michael Levi of the Council for Foreign Relations, “The climate treaty process isn’t going to die, but the real work of coordinating international efforts to reduce emissions will primarily occur elsewhere.” “That elsewhere,” speculates the New York Times, “will likely be a much smaller group of nations, roughly 30 countries responsible for 90 percent of global warming emissions,” i.e. the 30 most powerful nations. As for the weak, heard of Darwin?

  Then there’s the values stuff. What values led to the holocaust? I’m no expert in this area. On some level, ‘The Pearl’ must be right – there was money to be made in the exploitation and murder of millions of innocents. More interesting philosophical and sociological explanations have been put forward, but when all is said and done, most come down to the fact that we (people) like situations that work to our favour, especially if the consequences (or victims) are safely out of sight. The structure of the global political economy, for example, is such that I can easily afford to buy a cup of coffee most mornings, while the farmer who grew and harvested that coffee might struggle to feed her family. The distance between us allows me to sleep peacefully at night.

  So maybe Di-Aping is right on both counts. Maybe the small and vulnerable will continue to pay the price for the short-sightedness of the rich and powerful so long as ‘the dollar bill’ lies at the centre of our global value system.

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• Things superfluous and things important

  December 14, 2009 @ 4:22 pm | by Bryan

  I spent the last few days in London visiting an old friend who works in the city’s financial services sector. Most of our time together was spent arguing, and ultimately, those arguments boiled down to the fact that he sees individual freedom as the most important, or foundational value, while I’m not convinced.

  Both of us are Zimbabweans who, as the result of some form of privilege, were able to attend the kind of academic institutions that allowed us to leverage hard work and ability into professional roles for which there is global demand. As a result, we both now live in a part of the world that leverages its economic advantage to ensure that its citizenry enjoys a much more comfortable existence than most. The structure of Zimbabwe’s education system, and society at large, was such that those opportunities weren’t available to everyone. In fact, they were only available to a small minority. Far more Zimbabweans were born into situations that meant an enormous risk of ending up in a virtually inescapable poverty cycle. And poverty in that context meant much more than being dependent on social welfare.

  With that in mind, I just don’t buy the argument that my right to hold onto my wealth, or my freedom to do with my things whatever I see fit, somehow trumps an infant’s right to live. Either society at large, or ‘the state’ has the right to restrict some of my freedoms and take part of my wealth (or restrict my ability to accumulate that wealth) in order to feed that infant, or there is no such thing as a right to life. And if we do hold to the notion of a right to life, what do we make of the fact that the child born in Iceland is more that 20 times more likely to live to their first birthday than the child born in Pakistan? Is it any wonder that so many Pakistanis migrate from their country, legally or otherwise, to places where they feel their children are more likely to thrive?

  According to a Department of Foreign Affairs press release, “Ireland is working with our partner countries to find ways to adapt to climate changes and reduce their vulnerability … Today we committed to strengthening our efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals, increasing support to adaptation and to focusing on the poorest and most vulnerable. In all our negotiation, we are determined to focus on the human dimension of climate change, including food security, gender equality and women’s empowerment.”

  That’s great news, but is it enough? When it was thought that the world’s financial system might implode, the ‘global leaders’ dropped everything and did what needed doing in order to keep that system going. Poverty doesn’t evoke the same response. But what if Hobbes was right when he wrote, “Seeing every man, not only by Right, but also by necessity of Nature, is supposed to endeavor all he can, to obtain that which is necessary for his conservation; he that shall oppose himself against it, for things superfluous, is guilty of the war that thereupon is to follow?”

  May I suggest that most things, stood beside an infant’s life, are superfluous, regardless of their monetary value?

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• Copenhagen and Dublin

  December 8, 2009 @ 3:29 pm | by Bryan

  

  Members of an environmentalist group pretend to be dead during a protest demanding a real climate deal on the first day of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Photograph: Miguel Villagran/Getty Images.

  What do Copenhagen and Dublin have in common? Probably quite a few things. At the moment, the biggest might be that they are both sites of struggle over distribution. In Dublin’s case, what is being distributed are the costs of Ireland’s economic recovery. In the case of Copenhagen, it is the distribution of the benefits of industrialisation and the burden of the planet’s upkeep.

  I don’t often agree with The Economist’s take on things, but their analysis of the situation in Copenhagen is, in my opinion, spot on. In an article titled Stopping climate change, the newspaper writes:

  …The problem is not a lack of low-carbon technologies. Electricity can be generated by nuclear fission, hydropower, biomass, wind and solar energy; and cars and lorries can run on electricity or biofuels. Nor is the problem an economic one. A percentage point of global economic output is affordable for a worthwhile project. Saving the banks has cost around 5% of global output.

  So the problem is both simpler and cheaper to fix than most people think. But mankind has to agree on how to share out the costs, both between and within countries…

  It is only fair to point out that the science of climate change – especially the idea that human activity is responsible – is a contested field. Let’s therefore assume that there is only a strong possibility that our industrial activity currently poses a grave challenge to the future of the planet. Let’s also assume that The Economist is wrong and that correcting for climate change will cost something like 20% of global GDP. Doesn’t the same rationale that leads me to buy insurance still force us to take the potential threat of the ecological disaster seriously enough to fork out that 20%?

  If it does, who should pay? What does ‘global justice’ require? If the current consensus is right, if climate change is man made and disproportionately affects the poorest nations, then as things stand, wealth is unjustly being transferred from the poor to the rich. As things stand, the poor are paying for my lattes, high-speed broadband, and for my relatively cheap fuel by way of the destruction of their natural environment and the problems that creates – food insecurity, political instability, and others.

  And supposing the politicians in Denmark come to the same conclusion, what then? Is it the biggest polluters, or the people who consume their products who have a moral responsibility to pay for the damage they’ve done? Is it possible to separate self-interest and greed from such ethical considerations? Do the delegates have a responsibility to anyone other than the citizens they represent? Should this be an opportunity for the transfer of wealth back to the poor nations?

  If what has come out of Dublin thus far is anything to go by, the outcome will lead to a distribution of wealth along the lines of the current distribution of power. In other words, I don’t think Copenhagen will bring about very much substantial change. Poor people don’t tend to have very much power and the environment is easy to ignore – especially when you don’t live in a drought-prone area.

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• Duty

  December 3, 2009 @ 4:25 pm | by Bryan

  Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, made an interesting argument for global justice as far back as 1972. It revolved around whether people in affluent countries had a duty, a moral obligation, to help people far away. His Famine, Affluence and Morality paper focused on the ‘those dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical care’.

  Singer’s argument is refreshing in its simplicity, even if he imposes a standard that seems almost impossible to attain. His starting point is simple enough. If as I’m walking by a pond I see a drowning child, and if I am able to rescue her, am I morally obliged to do so? What if a crowd quickly gathers around the scene of the drowning; if no-one intervenes and the child dies, as just one of many potential rescuers, am I culpable for the child’s death? In his opinion, ‘if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally to do it’.

  Does it matter who the child is? Should it matter if it is our neighbour’s daughter, a boy from the community we recognise but don’t really know, or a complete stranger? According to Singer:
  The principle [that you should help when you can]takes, firstly, no account of proximity or distance. It makes no difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards away or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. Secondly, the principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do something and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position.

  I’ve had this argument with quite a few development practitioners. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that people are more likely to give to causes like overseas development if you offer them a warm fuzzy feeling, than if you claim that it is their moral duty to give. That being the case, most ‘charities’ sell those warm fuzzy feelings and use their earnings to help people in need. It’s a win-win situation and everyone is the better for it, right?

  I don’t think so. I want to vomit whenever I see an ad that uses vulnerable people to sell self-actualisation – even if those same vulnerable people derive some benefit from the process. Harm is done to them, despite the material benefit. Like Singer, I think it’s crucial to raise the issue of duty. Do we have a moral duty to fellow citizens? Most people obviously think we do, which is why they give up part of their income (tax) in order to help the destitute (social welfare budget). Do we have a duty towards people who live beyond national borders? If you buy Singer’s argument then we do. If you believe that there are such things as human rights and that they are inalienable, you too are bound to accept that you have a duty even to people far off. If not, you’re off the hook. You can chose to give or withhold as you see fit.

  Singer makes one more crucial point. He questions where we draw the line between duty and charity. He states that ‘the present way of drawing the distinction, which makes it an act of charity for a man living at the level of affluence which most people in the “developed nations” enjoy to give money to save someone else from starvation, cannot be supported’.

  Be it with respect to the local poor, flood victims in the West of Ireland, drought and famine victims in distant lands, or the concept of overseas development assistance, a debate on duty, as opposed to charity, is sorely needed.

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