The irrelevance of poverty for the morality of the lending system

CRISTIAN DIMITRIU

Berlín

Conferencia; Dimensions of Poverty; 2017

Universidad Libre de Berlin y Justitia Amplificata

It is usually thoughtthat if a policy generates poverty, that policy is unjust. Thus, weshould evaluate policies by measuring poverty that results from them.If, say, a government decides to change the rules for having accessto health benefits, and it turns out that more people will fall belowthe poverty line as a result of this new rule, the new rule will beconsidered unjust on this thought. The same kind of idea is common inthe context of global justice debates. It is clear, however, thatpoverty creation is neither a necessary nor a sufficient conditionfor a policy to be unjust. It might well be the case that a policygenerates poverty and it is still perfectly acceptable and,conversely, it might be the case that a policy does not generatepoverty (and, in fact, even improves the situation of most people)but it is totally unjust. Reducing funding to health can beacceptable on the ground that it is required to prevent even biggerproblems, such as inflation; and improving health benefits for thepoor can be unacceptable if the funds are obtained by reducing thebudget for even poorer groups of the population. However, we stillwant to say that some policies are just or unjust, and there are goodreasons for believing that they are. But the effect they cause on thepopulation does not seem to be entirely relevant.In this paper, I make theidea that poverty outcomes are not necessarily morally relevant forassessing policies as clear as possible by discussing a specific caseof the global justice debate: sovereign debts. The claim I would liketo defend is that generating poverty among the population of a poorstate as a result of a loan is independent from the fact that suchdebt is morally binding. In other words, what makes a debtnon-binding is not the fact that it generated, or that it failed togenerate, poverty. Thus, it is misguided to measure poverty as a wayof testing the legitimacy of the international lending system. Theview I defend can be put in contrast with the one that Poggedefended. In a few writings, Pogge has argued or implied that whatmakes the current international lending rules unjust is that theygenerate poverty, or human rights deficits. Thus, he evaluateslending rules in terms of the results or effects they cause on thepopulation or, in other words, in terms of how much poverty theygenerate. So for Pogge lending to autocratic regimes is wrong, mainlybecause of the effects it will have on the population. If povertyincreases by, say, 20% after lending to an autocratic ruler, the loanwill be illegitimate, on the ground that it has made people worseoff. Pogge calls the rules by which these effects take place?borrowing privilege?.