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Why Do We Disagree about our Obligations to the Poor?

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Abstract

People disagree about whether individuals in rich countries like the United States have an obligation to aid the world’s poorest people. A tempting thought is that this disagreement comes down to a non-moral matter. I argue that we should be suspicious of this view. Drawing on psychological evidence, I show that we should be more pessimistic about our ability to attribute the disagreement to a difference in factual beliefs.

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Notes

  1. See also Appiah 2010: 236–237, Brink 2000: 161, Hursthouse 1999: 244–245, Levy 2014: 24, Rachels 2009: 41, Shafer-Landau 2003: 219, Sturgeon 2012: 164, and Vavova 2014: 323.

  2. See for example Cowen 2009, Fagelson 2009, Gomberg 2002: 54–63, Kekes 2002: 515–516, Kuper 2002: 111–112, Jamieson 2005: 167–168, Narveson 2004: 339–342, Schweickart 2008: 479–482, and Wenar 2011, among others.

  3. Unsurprisingly, factual disagreement may stem from motivated reasoning. This idea is hardly new. See for example Prinz 2007: 192 and Smyth 2017: 466–467.

  4. See Berkey 2016: 3022–3023, Lichtenberg 2009: 236, and McMahan 2000: 102–103. For a helpful overview of alternative methods of explaining moral disagreement, see Enoch 2009: 24–27.

  5. Singer gives stronger formulations of the principle but claims that this version is sufficient for his purposes. By “morally significant,” he means “causing anything else…bad to happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral good” (1972: 231).

  6. Aid skeptics offer several reasons for thinking that aid may be harmful. Here are a few of them. First, aid promotes unsustainable levels of population. Second, by redirecting our resources to aid programs, we often harm local economies and prevent developing countries from becoming economically self-sufficient. Third, aid supports oppressive regimes and tends to distract us from the need for political change. For a helpful overview of the empirical debate over aid, see especially Cullity 2004: 36–42, Lichtenberg 2014: 192–194, and Singer 2009: 111–125.

  7. Singer writes: “the right kind of aid can help the poor whether or not it promotes economic growth” and “even if it does not lead to better institutions” (2009: 111, 117). He also claims that aid can “help achieve a sustainable population” (2009: 124).

  8. Other commentators have also noticed the benefits of retreating to the weak thesis. For example, expanding on Singer’s work, Garrett Cullity writes: “The important question is whether you can easily do something to help. If you can, there remains an argument from beneficence for doing so” (2004: 47–48; cf. Lichtenberg 2009: 237).

  9. As Lichtenberg points out, “despite the titles of [their] books,” critics of aid “almost invariably have suggestions about what can be done to alleviate global poverty, including ideas about what affluent people and countries should do” (2014: 190).

  10. See footnote 6.

  11. Global trade and political activism, according to Singer, are not enough. Global trade fails to help many poor people (2002a: 122) and even seriously harms some of them (2013: 325–326). Efforts to bring about political change, moreover, appear to have little chance of success (2009: 36), including efforts to eliminate trade barriers in the United States (2009: 114).

  12. To be fair, Unger argues that the intuition in question is distorted by psychological factors such as “futility thinking,” the tendency to believe we have no duty to the distant because we cannot save everyone (1996: 63; cf. Singer 2009: 60). But this aspect of his view does not undermine the present point. For discussion, see Berkey 2016: 3023–3024.

  13. Thanks to Jim A.C. Everett for sharing this data with me.

  14. Someone might argue that there could still be factual disagreement here. Participants in the study may just have had conflicting views about the benefits of purchasing a new cell phone. Yet it is unlikely that this difference alone would lead people to affirm such radically different moral judgments. Discrepant beliefs about the effectiveness of aid seem much more able to account for the conflicting judgments but participants know that John has no doubt his contribution will save a child from dying of malaria. Of course, some participants may have thought that John is mistaken. But even when participants are explicitly instructed to assume that aid benefits the poor, the perceived wrongfulness of not donating to aid agencies remains both comparatively low and significantly less than the perceived wrongfulness of failing to help a nearby drowning child (Kahane et al. 2015, study 3). I am indebted to Jim A.C. Everett for the results of this study.

  15. Someone might worry that the psychological evidence does not provide a strong case against the empirical explanation, as efforts to replicate psychological studies often fail to reproduce observed effects. Granting that further research is still needed to determine the replicability of the findings in Kahane et al. (2015), initial indications are nonetheless encouraging. In a recent paper, Conway et al. (2018) replicate many of the key findings of Kahane and his colleagues. Even when researchers stipulate that “aid organizations are working effectively” and “saving lives,” the perceived wrongfulness of non-contribution to foreign aid is low (2.45, on average, on a scale of 1–7, where 1 = not at all wrong and 7 = very wrong). A replication study of the Envelope Case* produced a similar result (2.47). By contrast, the perceived wrongfulness of failing to help a drowning child is very high (6.8) (Conway et al. 2018). I am grateful to an anonymous referee for suggesting that I consider this issue.

  16. I am grateful to Jonas Nagel for sharing the results of this study.

  17. How do we know that my argument is not vulnerable to the charge of suppressed evidence or “cherry picking”? First, as we have seen, the envelope cases fit with a growing body of psychological evidence. Numerous studies support the idea that people tend to align their factual beliefs with their moral judgments. Several powerful and well-established cognitive mechanisms appear to generate this tendency, including biased assimilation and dissonance avoidance. Cultural cognition researchers in psychology and the social sciences argue that these mechanisms predispose us to align our factual beliefs with our moral values (Kahan et al. 2007). Second, in my experience, the envelope cases are not unusual. Students continue to deny having an obligation to donate to foreign aid even when they grant that aid reduces suffering and saves lives. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for pressing me to reflect on this issue.

  18. If our intuitions are generally untrustworthy, then it is unclear whether we can rely on them to obtain moral knowledge. However, for the suggestion that criticism of common intuitions need not lead to skepticism, see Singer (2005).

  19. However, for discussion, see Binder and Heilmann (2017: 549–555).

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    Peter Seipel

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Seipel, P. Why Do We Disagree about our Obligations to the Poor?. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 22, 121–136 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-019-09975-9

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