The Irrelevance of Poverty Measurement for Reaching Normative Conclusion About the Morality of Lending

CRISTIAN DIMITRIU

Bad Homburg

Conferencia; Europe Today: Normative Challenges, Justitia Amplificata Annual Conference; 2016

Justitia Amplificata (University of Frankfurt - Free University of Berlin)

This paper is about the irrelevance of poverty measurement for reaching normative conclusions. The general point I want to make is that, in some contexts, the fact that a policy X generates poverty does not imply that such policy will necessarily be unjust. Policy X might well be unjust, but not because of the fact that it generated poverty, but for others reasons. In order to make this point as clearly as possible, I discuss a specific example: the debts that the poorest states are currently burdened with, the relationship between these debts and poverty creation, and the normative conclusions we can reach from this. The claim I would like to defend is that generating poverty among the population of a poor state as a result of a loan is independent from the fact that such debt is morally binding. In other words, what makes a debt non-binding is not the fact that it generated or that it failed to generate poverty. Thus, it is misguided to measure poverty as a way of testing the legitimacy of the international lending system.