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The Nature of Poverty as an Inhuman Condition

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Abstract

In this article, part of a symposium devoted to Hennie Lötter’s Poverty, Ethics and Justice, my aims are threefold. First, I present a careful reading of Lötter’s original and compelling central conception of the nature of poverty as the inability to ‘obtain adequate economic resources….to maintain physical health and engage in social activities distinctive of human beings in their respective societies’. After motivating this view, particularly in comparison to other salient accounts of poverty, I, second, raise some objections to it, regarding relativistic implications that it has. Third, I propose another, more universalist conception of the nature of poverty, which is inspired by some of Lötter’s other remarks and which is all the stronger. According to this view, people are more poor, the less they can obtain adequate economic resources to pursue a wide array of finally valuable activities and states characteristic of human beings. I conclude by briefly pointing out how this view merits critical comparison with related views, such as Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach.

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Notes

  1. For an ancestor, see comments by the young Marx (1844a, b).

  2. For additional critics of the notion of relative poverty, see Townsend (2006), Shaw (2008).

  3. See Robeyns (2005) for someone who entertains the idea that poverty is a lack of resources, and not merely wrong insofar as it is.

  4. Although Peter Singer defines absolute poverty in terms of the inability to meet needs (1993, p. 220), it is not clear that he coherently can, given his adherence to preference utilitarianism. Or at the very least, he must think of the wrongness of poverty in terms of preference dissatisfaction. And against the hedonist instance of utilitarianism, surely one would count as poor if one died a painless death as a result of lacking economic resources. To be poor is not merely to suffer, even if suffering often accompanies poverty.

  5. For just two examples of a moralized conception of poverty, see the ‘ethical poverty line’ of Edward (2006) and the view that poverty ‘is, by definition, morally wrong’ in Graf and Schweiger (2013, p. 7).

  6. For a similar view, although packaged under the heading of ‘relative poverty’, see Grayling (2013), EAPN (2014).

  7. Towards the end of the book Lötter does want a moralized conception of poverty (see, e.g., 2011, pp. 270–271), but I gather that he intends it to supplement (and not supplant) the initial, non-moralized conception.

  8. However, the phrase ‘or live in conditions that devalue their status as human beings in meaningful ways’ might open the door to a reading that squares with my non-moralized construal.

  9. Lötter at some points suggests that virtually everyone, including the poor themselves, have a duty to fight poverty (see, e.g., 2011, p. 4).

  10. Perhaps it would be worth appealing to considerations of arbitrariness, rather than unfairness, on which see (Rawls 1999, pp. 63–65, 82–88, as interpreted by Metz 2000).

  11. Note that Amartya Sen’s (1999) version of capability theory, which has also been extremely influential, does not tie the relevant capacities to ones constitute of an objective human good.

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Acknowledgments

For comments on an earlier version of this article, I thank participants in a workshop devoted to Hennie Lötter’s Poverty, Ethics and Justice held at the University of Johannesburg in November 2013, especially Gillian Brock, Daryl Glaser, Hennie Lötter, Darrel Moellendorf and Brian Penrose. This work is based on research supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa, and I acknowledge that the opinions, findings and conclusions expressed in this NRF supported publication are those of the author, and that the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard.

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Metz, T. The Nature of Poverty as an Inhuman Condition. Res Publica 22, 327–342 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-016-9318-1

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