Global Poverty: Moral Theory and Empirical Knowledge

EDUARDO RIVERA LÓPEZ

Düsseldorf

Conferencia; Conferencia dictada en el Instituto de Sociología de la Universidad de Düsseldorf; 2007

Around 1200 million people, one fourth of the world population, lives on less than 1 dollar a day, and around 2,800 million, 46 percent of the humankind, on less than 2 dollars a day. 800 million are undernourished. Almost 6 million children under the age of five die every year from hunger-related (and therefore preventable) causes. These figures are well-known, and they are appalling. Beyond some disagreements of detail as to how to count the poor and how to measure poverty, there is a wide consensus that these facts are morally disturbing and that overcoming global poverty is one of the most fundamental moral challenges of our time. Thus far the agreement is quite clear, but it also stops here. Opinions drastically differ about the nature and scope of the failure involved in global poverty and about the ways to overcome it. The map of those opinions and theories is complex and includes both empirical and normative disagreements. One striking feature of these controversies is the lack of communication between those who work on normative issues (philosophers) and those concerned with empirical ones (social scientists, economists). Such lack of communication is puzzling because one would expect that the problem has both normative and empirical aspects and that they are interrelated. The main purpose of this paper is to take a first step toward remedying this failure by clarifying the role of, and the relationship between, the normative and empirical components of any (plausible) theory of global justice that shares that global poverty is morally wrong (or bad) and should be eradicated. From my analysis it will follow that leading theories on global justice fail to connect these components adequately.