Seoulscapade

Peter Singer
The 10th Dasan Memorial Lectures 2007

1. Introduction

In this lecture I want to discuss what I see as the two ethical greatest failures of the industrialized nations in their relations with the rest of the world. The first of these is the issue of anthropogenic climate change, and the second is the response of these nations to the problem of global poverty. Although these are distinct issues, both of them challenge the way in which we draw the boundaries of our moral communities. To solve them, we need to extend these boundaries to include not only members of our own nation, but the entire population of our planet.

Today there is no longer any serious dispute about the fact that human activities are changing the climate of our planet. Climate change is not going to be a bad thing for every part of the world. It will help to make the frozen north of Russia and Canada more livable and more productive. Billions of the world’s poorest people, however, will have their lives put at risk by more erratic rainfall patterns, with some arid regions turning into deserts, and rising sea levels inundating fertile but low-lying delta regions that are home for tens of millions of peasant farmers in countries like Bangladesh and Egypt. Global warming will also mean more forest fires; hurricanes hitting cities that at present are too far from the equator to be affected by them; tropical diseases spreading beyond their present zones; the extinction of species unable to adapt to warmer temperatures; retreating glaciers and melting polar ice-caps; and rising sea levels inundating coastal areas. A far worse scenario cannot be ruled out: some scientists believe that the melting of the ice caps could release huge amounts of methane that accelerate further warming, forming a cloud layer so dense as to block out heat from the sun and cause the planet to go into a deep freeze that extinguishes life on earth.

Public discussions of climate change have generally focused on scientific, economic and political aspects. But climate change is an ethical issue, and among the most vital ethical issues we face today. The best way to understand how global warming is an ethical problem is to think of it as a question about how best to divide a scarce resource that no one owns. The scarce resource is the atmosphere, or more specifically, the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb our waste gases without changing the planet’s climate in harmful ways. We might compare the situation of the atmosphere, in this respect, to that of a lake surrounded by 200 different villages which depend on the lake for fish, an important part of their food supply. Each of these villages puts its wastes into the lake, but the amount of waste going into the lake varies considerably from village to village. The total amount is rising steadily, however, and experts predict that if the level of sewage is not reduced, the ecology of the lake will change, and some, or perhaps even all, of the fish will die.

Clearly, the villages need to agree on an acceptable amount of waste to go into the lake and, once that level has been agreed upon, to allocate each village a quota for the amount of waste it can put into the lake. There are different possible ways of allocating this quota. One would be to ask which villages have brought about the current problem. If some villages have, historically, put far more waste into the lake than others, it might be argued that they are the ones that should get the lowest quotas for the future – and perhaps even that they ought to compensate the villages that have put little or no waste into the lake for any reduced fish catch that they may suffer. In environmental law, this is known as the “polluter pays” principle. It is a fundamental point of economic theory that for markets to work efficiently, all costs should be “internalised” – that is, included in the costs of production – which means that if a producer emits pollution that harms any third parties, the producer should have to pay for the costs of cleaning up the pollution and/or compensating those affected by it.

Another possible principle would be to ignore the past, and give every village an equal waste disposal quota. But if the villages were unequal in population size, this would be unfair to those who live in the larger villages. A fairer sollution would be to divide the total amount of waste that the lake can handle by the number of people living around the lake, thus obtaining a per capita amount of acceptable pollution. Multiplying this per capita amount by the number of people living in each village would then yield the village’s quota for putting sewage into the lake. In the absence of other relevant factors, this is a self-evidently fair way to divide a common resource to which no individual, or group of individuals, has a stronger claim than any other. It is the same rule we use when dividing a pie among a group of, say, ten people, each of whom is hungry enough to want at least a quarter of the pie, but none of whom have any entitlement to more of the pie than any of the others.

If there are wide differences of wealth between the villages around the lake, a third possible principle might be considered. In such circumstances, some hold that it is fair for the better-off to make greater sacrifices than the worst-off – especially if the hardship suffered by the worst-off is due to the circumstances of their birth, the abilities they have inherited, or other circumstances for which they cannot be held responsible. If this principle is sound, the better-off villages should accept far stricter quotas than those villages that are badly-off.

I have identified three principles that might plausibly be held to govern the distribution of a scarce resource in circumstances like those we now face with regard to global warming. To decide which of these principles should apply would take us deep into contentious areas of normative ethics. But in practical terms, the choice between the principles is less relevant than one might at first think, because all three of them point in the same direction. Over the past two centuries, the nations that industrialized first emitted large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Most of it is still there, and that is why the atmosphere has exhausted its capacity to absorb more greenhouse gases without a change in the planet’s climate. Using the principle that the polluter should pay, it therefore seems reasonable that the developed countries, rather than the developing countries, should currently bear the burden of dealing with the problem of global warming. But if we forget about the past and switch to the equal share rule that we use when we cut up a pie, we also reach the outcome that the developed countries are the ones that need to cut their emissions most drastically. Developed nations account for three-quarters of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions while constituting only one-quarter of the world’s population. The United States, for example, uses at least five times its national quota under a system of equal per capita shares. Turning to the third principle, that the better-off should make greater sacrifices than the poor, leads to the same conclusion: it is the developed nations that are better off, and should be bearing the largest share of the burden of avoiding climate change.

By using more than their fair share of the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb our waste gases, the rich nations are, in all likelihood, inflicting devastating future losses on the poor farmers of developing nations – people who have no ability to mitigate the consequences of loss of rainfall, or rising sea levels. When President George W. Bush was asked, early in his presidency, if he intended to do anything about this situation, he replied: “We will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America.” Although Bush might not use the same language today, in the face of greater concern about climate change, there is nothing he has actually done that indicates any departure from this “America First” philosophy. A recent report prepared by his administration has shown that U.S. emissions are steadily increasing, and will grow 11 percent from 2002 to 2012.

Perhaps it might be objected that the principle of fairness that holds for dividing up a limited amount of food cannot be applied to the situation of greenhouse gas emissions. But then, the onus is on those who say this to suggest a different principle of fairness. And I am not aware of any plausible conception of fairness that could entitle the rich nations to continue their current practices of using such a large share of the limited capacity of our atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases without bringing about disastrous climate change.

When the U.S. refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, it made other nations bear the burden of taking the first steps toward dealing with the problem of global warming. Of course, the Kyoto Protocol is not, in itself, enough but it is a first step.

Remember that people in the rich nations are continuing their high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, not so that they can survive, but so that they can maintain their present high levels of material comfort, driving their cars and turning on the airconditioning whenever they feel like it. As every foreigner who visits the US notices, most buildings are overheated in winter and excessively air-conditioned in summer – a minor symptom of a national habit of extravagantly wasteful energy usage. Despite a lot more talk about saving energy, nothing much has changed in recent respect. When in New York last summer, I went out on a warm evening to see An Inconvenient Truth, the Al Gore movie about global warming, the cinema was so cold I had to wear a jacket.

Today a few rich nations are unjustly appropriating a scarce resource that belongs to all nations, and to which they have no greater claim than any other nation. In order to avoid imposing some modest costs on themselves, they are putting in peril the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Some will object that for the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to a fifth of what they are now – as the equal per capita shares principle suggests it should do – would cause a major economic crash, especially if this were to be done in, say, a single decade, and this would be bad for everyone. We don’t really know if that is the case, but it would be unwise to take the risk. We do need to take consequences into account, and especially costs for the poor and disenfranchised. But no one is suggesting that, in the foreseeable future, the US should aim to cut back its emissions to anything approximating what its global fair per capita share would be. The point of teasing out the implications of the equal per capita share view is that it shows us just how outrageous the current stance of the US is. The US is like a greedy person who, when the pie has been cut up so that everyone who wants pie can have an equal slice, takes five slices instead of just one, and then walks away, leaving it to the others to figure out how to adjust the remaining portions of the pie. Moreover, this greedy person is already overfed, while many of the others who were hoping for a slice of pie are severely underfed.

There is, in any case, an obvious solution to the concern that an equitable solution may increase overall costs. The Kyoto Protocol already permits developed countries to sell entitlements to emit greenhouse gases that they do not need to use themselves. Because the developing nations have no binding quotas in the first round of Kyoto cuts, they have nothing to sell. But if the Kyoto Protocol were based on equal per capita shares, the developing nations would see that they have nothing to lose, and a great deal to gain, by agreeing to be bound by the same rules as the developed countries. They would then be able to sell their quota. India, for example, would have a quota proportionate to its population of around one billion, but on current emissions it would require only about a third of that amount. So it would be able to sell on the world market entitlements to emit more than 600 million per capita shares. The United States and other developed nations would bid for those entitlements, and others that would be offered by other developing nations. As long as the total global quota is a significant reduction on present global emissions, this system would provide every country with an incentive to reduce its emissions – the developed nations, so that they would not need to buy so much from others, and the developing nations, so that they would have more of their quota free to sell. As a result the developed nations would be able to avoid the kind of drastic reductions in emissions required by a system based on equal per capita shares without saleable quotas, but to do so they would have to transfer some of their wealth to the developing nations. There would be nothing unfair about such a transfer, for it represents the fact that the wealth of the developed nations is made possible by their use of a resource that they do not own. They would simply be paying the rent.

Instituting a global system of trading emission quotas would also answer the objection that equal per capita shares would lead to inefficient production, in greenhouse gas terms. The present system of uncontrolled emissions allows developed nations like the United States to reap economic benefits for themselves, while imposing costs on third parties who do not share in the benefits of the polluters’ high productivity. A system of equal per capita entitlements combined with a market in emissions quotas would, by internalising the true costs of production, lead to a more economically efficient outcome. Admittedly, implementing such a system would be a serious challenge for existing global institutions. It would require measuring each country’s emissions and applying some form of sanction to countries that exceed their quotas. Somehow this challenge would have to be met. Climate change is a global problem, and it is difficult to envisage any solution that does not require effective global institutions.

Now I shall turn to the issue of global poverty. We are living in a world in which more than a billion people live at a level of affluence never previously known, while roughly a billion other people struggle to survive on the purchasing power equivalent of less than one U.S. dollar per day. Most of the world’s poorest people are undernourished, lack access to safe drinking water or even the most basic health services and cannot send their children to school. According to Unicef, the United Nations Children’s fund, more than 10 million children die every year ― about 30,000 per day ― from avoidable, poverty-related causes. In this situation, what obligations do the wealthier nations have? And what obligations do we – residents of those wealthier nations, who every day spend not just one dollar, but usually many dollars, on luxuries and purchases that are trivial, not things we really need – have?

Last June the investor Warren Buffett took a significant step toward reducing those deaths when he pledged $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and another $6 billion to other charitable foundations. Buffett’s pledge, set alongside the nearly $30 billion given by Bill and Melinda Gates to their foundation, has made it clear that the first decade of the 21st century is a new “golden age of philanthropy.” Gates’s and Buffett’s donations will now be put to work primarily to reduce poverty, disease and premature death in the developing world. According to the Global Forum for Health Research, less than 10 percent of the world’s health research budget is spent on combating conditions that account for 90 percent of the global burden of disease. In the past, diseases that affect only the poor have been of no commercial interest to pharmaceutical manufacturers, because the poor cannot afford to buy their products. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), heavily supported by the Gates Foundation, seeks to change this by guaranteeing to purchase millions of doses of vaccines, when they are developed, that can prevent diseases like malaria. GAVI has also assisted developing countries to immunize more people with existing vaccines: 99 million additional children have been reached to date. By doing this, GAVI claims to have already averted nearly 1.7 million future deaths.

Philanthropy on this scale raises both factual and ethical questions. Does it do any good? Should we praise the rich for giving so much or criticize them for not giving still more? Is it troubling that such momentous decisions are made by a few extremely wealthy individuals? And what obligations do we, who are not among the superrich, have to the poor?

Some people believe that if the rich have worked hard to earn their money, they are entitled to keep it. As long as they have not themselves caused the plight of the poor, they are under no obligation to give them anything. But we should recognize that there is a lot of good luck in being rich. People can earn large amounts only when they live under favorable social circumstances, and they don’t create those circumstances by themselves. Warren Buffett has acknowledged that society is responsible for much of his wealth. “If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru,” he said, “you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil.” The Nobel Prize-winning economist and social scientist Herbert Simon estimated that “social capital” is responsible for at least 90 percent of what people earn in wealthy societies like those of the United States or northwestern Europe. By social capital Simon meant not only natural resources but, more important, the technology and organizational skills in the community, and the presence of good government. These are the foundation on which the rich can begin their work. “On moral grounds,” Simon added, “we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent.” Simon was not, of course, advocating so steep a rate of tax, for he was well aware of disincentive effects. But his estimate does undermine the argument that the rich are entitled to keep their wealth because it is all a result of their hard work. If Simon is right, that is true of at most 10 percent of it.

In any case, even if we were to grant that people deserve every dollar they earn, that doesn’t answer the question of what they should do with it. We might say that they have a right to spend it on lavish parties, private jets and luxury yachts, or, for that matter, to flush it down the toilet. But we could still think that for them to do these things while others die from easily preventable diseases is wrong. In an article I wrote more than three decades ago, at the time of a humanitarian emergency in what is now Bangladesh, I used the example of walking by a shallow pond and seeing a small child who has fallen in and appears to be in danger of drowning. Even though we did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond, almost everyone agrees that if we can save the child at minimal inconvenience or trouble to ourselves, we ought to do so. Anything else would be callous, indecent and, in a word, wrong. The fact that in rescuing the child we may, for example, ruin a new pair of shoes is not a good reason for allowing the child to drown. Similarly if for the cost of a pair of shoes we can contribute to a health program in a developing country that stands a good chance of saving the life of a child, we ought to do so.

Perhaps, though, our obligation to help the poor is even stronger than this example implies, for we are less innocent than the passer-by who did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond. Thomas Pogge has argued that at least some of our affluence comes at the expense of the poor. He bases this claim not simply on the usual critique of the barriers that Europe and the United States maintain against agricultural imports from developing countries but also on less familiar aspects of our trade with developing countries. For example, he points out that international corporations are willing to make deals to buy natural resources from any government, no matter how it has come to power. This provides a huge financial incentive for groups to try to overthrow the existing government. Successful rebels are rewarded by being able to sell off the nation’s oil, minerals or timber.

In their dealings with corrupt dictators in developing countries, Pogge asserts, international corporations are morally no better than someone who knowingly buys stolen goods ― with the difference that the international legal and political order recognizes the corporations, not as criminals in possession of stolen goods but as the legal owners of the goods they have bought. This situation is, of course, beneficial for the industrial nations, because it enables us to obtain the raw materials we need to maintain our prosperity, but it is a disaster for resource-rich developing countries, turning the wealth that should benefit them into a curse that leads to a cycle of coups, civil wars and corruption and is of little benefit to the people as a whole.

In this light, our obligation to the poor is not just one of providing assistance to strangers but one of compensation for harms that we have caused and are still causing them. It might be argued that we do not owe the poor compensation, because our affluence actually benefits them. Living luxuriously, it is said, provides employment, and so wealth trickles down, helping the poor more effectively than aid does. But the rich in industrialized nations buy virtually nothing that is made by the very poor. During the past 20 years of economic globalization, although expanding trade has helped lift many of the world’s poor out of poverty, it has failed to benefit the poorest 10 percent of the world’s population. Some of the extremely poor, most of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa, have nothing to sell that rich people want, while others lack the infrastructure to get their goods to market. If they can get their crops to a port, European and U.S. subsidies often mean that they cannot sell them, despite ― as for example in the case of West African cotton growers who compete with vastly larger and richer U.S. cotton producers ― having a lower production cost than the subsidized producers in the rich nations.

The remedy to these problems, it might reasonably be suggested, should come from the state, not from private philanthropy. When aid comes through the government, everyone who earns above the tax-free threshold contributes something, with more collected from those with greater ability to pay. Much as we may applaud what Gates and Buffett are doing, we can also be troubled by a system that leaves the fate of hundreds of millions of people hanging on the decisions of two or three private citizens. But the amount of foreign development aid given by the developed nations is woefully inadequate. The United States is the largest donor of government aid in absolute terms, but as a percentage of its gross domestic product, the U.S. ranks near the bottom, giving only 0.22 percent of its gross national income in foreign aid, or just 22 cents for every $100 the nation earns. (These figures are for 2005, the most recent year for which data is available on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] website.) Australia gave 0.25 percent of its gross national income. Japan gives a little more, 0.28 percent. But Korea’s record is much worse. In 2005 Korea’s foreign aid amounted to only 0.10 cent of its gross national income, just one tenth of one percent, a figure that is well below that of all the OECD Development Assistance Committee nations. (Greece is at the bottom of the OECD Development Assistance Committee nations, giving 0.17 percent of its gross national income.) As Cho Kun-ho, vice-president of the Federation of Korean Industries said last October, “Korea’s present foreign aid is hardly adequate considering that its economic power is ranked 12th in the world. Without a drastic increase in overseas aid, Korea may be considered a stingy member of the international community.” The good news, however, is that Korea’s aid did increase quite drastically between 2004 and 2005 – by almost 60 percent – and one can hope that the path will continue upward.

For several years now, the only countries to exceed the United Nations recommended target of 0.7 percent of gross national income have been Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and Luxemburg. They do far better than all other nations, but even they give less than 1 percent of their income. This is still not enough to stop avoidable poverty-related deaths that are occurring all the time, nor is it so much as to be involve any significant hardship to the donor nations. As things now stand, therefore, there is no country in the world in which the case for individual contributions to relieve global poverty can be refuted by the argument that one’s government has taken care of the problem.

Aid has always had its critics. Carefully planned and intelligently directed private philanthropy may be the best answer to the claim that aid doesn’t work. Since non-government organizations are unconstrained by diplomatic considerations or the desire to swing votes at the United Nations, they can more easily avoid dealing with corrupt or wasteful governments. They can go directly into the field, working with local villages and grass-roots organizations. Of course, as in any large-scale human enterprise, some aid can be ineffective. But provided that aid isn’t actually counterproductive, even relatively inefficient assistance is likely to do more to advance human wellbeing than luxury spending by the wealthy.

The rich, then, should give – not just rich nations, but rich individuals. But who are “the rich” and how much should they give? Bill Gates may have given away nearly $30 billion, but that still leaves him sitting at the top of the Forbes list of the richest Americans, with $53 billion. His 66,000-square-foot high-tech lakeside estate near Seattle is reportedly worth more than $100 million. Property taxes are about $1 million. Among his possessions is the Leicester Codex, the only handwritten book by Leonardo da Vinci still in private hands, for which he paid $30.8 million in 1994. Has Bill Gates done enough? More pointedly, you might ask: if he really believes – as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website proclaims – that all lives have equal value, what is he doing living in such an expensive house and owning a Leonardo Codex? Are there no more lives that could be saved by living more modestly and adding the money thus saved to the amount he has already given?

Yet we should recognize that, if judged by the proportion of his wealth that he has given away, Gates compares very well with most of the other extremely rich people in the world. Consider, for example, Gates’s former colleague and Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen. Allen, who left the company in 1983, has given, over his lifetime, more than $800 million to philanthropic causes. Very, very few people will ever be able to give nearly as much. But Forbes magazine lists Allen as the fifth-richest American, with a net worth of $16 billion. He owns the Seattle Seahawks, the Portland Trailblazers, a 413-foot oceangoing yacht that carries two helicopters and a 60-foot submarine. He has given only about 5 percent of his total wealth.

Is there a line of moral adequacy that falls between the 5 percent that Allen has given away and the roughly 35 percent that Gates has donated? Few people have set a personal example that would allow them to tell Gates that he has not given enough, but one who could is Zell Kravinsky. A few years ago, when he was in his mid-40s, Kravinsky gave almost all of his $45 million real estate fortune to health-related charities, retaining only his modest family home in Jenkintown, near Philadelphia, and enough to meet his family’s ordinary expenses. After learning that thousands of people with failing kidneys die each year while waiting for a transplant, he contacted a Philadelphia hospital and donated one of his kidneys to a complete stranger. In Kravinsky’s view, to withhold a kidney from someone who would otherwise die means valuing one’s own life at 4,000 times that of a stranger, a ratio Kravinsky considers “obscene.”

What marks Kravinsky out from the rest of us is that he takes the equal value of all human life as a guide to life, not just as a nice piece of rhetoric. Buffett says he believes in giving his children “enough so they feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.” That means, in his judgment, “a few hundred thousand” each. In absolute terms, that is far more than most Americans are able to leave their children and, by Kravinsky’s standard, certainly too much. But even if Buffett left each of his three children a million dollars each, he would still have given away more than 99.99 percent of his wealth. When someone does that much ― especially in a society in which the norm is to leave most of your wealth to your children ― it is better to praise them than to cavil about the extra few hundred thousand dollars they might have given.

Philosophers like Liam Murphy and Kwame Anthony Appiah at Princeton contend that our obligations are limited to carrying our fair share of the burden of relieving global poverty. They would have us calculate how much would be required to ensure that the world’s poorest people have a chance at a decent life, and then divide this sum among the affluent. That would give us each an amount to donate, and having given that, we would have fulfilled our obligations to the poor.

What might that fair amount be? One way of calculating it would be to take as our target, at least for the next nine years, the Millennium Development Goals, set by the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000. On that occasion, the largest gathering of world leaders in history jointly pledged to meet, by 2015, a list of goals that include:

– Reducing by half the proportion of the world’s people in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than the purchasing-power equivalent of one U.S. dollar per day).
–Reducing by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
–Ensuring that children everywhere are able to take a full course of primary schooling.
–Ending sex disparity in education.
–Reducing by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under 5.
–Reducing by three-quarters the rate of maternal mortality.
–Halting and beginning to reverse the spread of H.I.V./AIDS and halting and beginning to reduce the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.
–Reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.

Last year a United Nations task force, led by the Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, estimated the annual cost of meeting these goals to be $121 billion in 2006, rising to $189 billion by 2015. When we take account of existing official development aid promises, the additional amount needed each year to meet the goals is only $48 billion for 2006 and $74 billion for 2015. This is really quite a modest amount of money. Consider, for instance, the fact that in the United States alone, there are 14,400 taxpayers earning a minimum of $5,000,000. There earnings total $184 billion. It would be no great hardship for them to give away a third of their annual income, for that would still leave each of them with an annual income of at least $3.3 million. The total amount that would be yielded by such a donation $61 billion, or more than the extra aid Sachs calculated was needed for 2006.

Now suppose that others around the world who are also very rich – even if not quite as rich as these – were to give a significant proportion of their income to meeting the goals set at the Millennium Development Summit. We can imagine a sliding scale, according to which those who earn more than $2,000,000 but less than $5,000,000 give a quarter of their income, those who earn between $1,000,000 and $2,000,000 give a fifth, and so on. Using a similar scale, and not going below those who are in the top ten percent of United States income earners, I calculate that wealthy people in the U.S. could contribute more than $400 billion annually while still remaining financially very comfortable. If we broaden this picture to include wealthy people all over the world, we could easily double that figure. That’s more than six times what the task force chaired by Sachs estimated would be required for 2006 in order to be on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals, and more than 16 times the shortfall between that sum and existing official development aid commitments.

If we are obliged to do no more than our fair share of eliminating global poverty, the burden will not be great. But is that really all we ought to do? Since we all agree that fairness is a good thing, and none of us like doing more because others don’t pull their weight, the fair-share view is attractive. In the end, however, I think we should reject it. Let’s return to the drowning child in the shallow pond. Imagine it is not 1 small child who has fallen in, but 50 children. We are among 50 adults, unrelated to the children, picnicking on the lawn around the pond. We can easily wade into the pond and rescue the children, and the fact that we would find it cold and unpleasant sloshing around in the knee-deep muddy water is no justification for failing to do so. The “fair share” theorists would say that if we each rescue one child, all the children will be saved, and so none of us have an obligation to save more than one. But what if half the picnickers prefer staying clean and dry to rescuing any children at all? Is it acceptable if the rest of us stop after we have rescued just one child, knowing that we have done our fair share, but that half the children will drown? We might justifiably be furious with those who are not doing their fair share, but our anger with them is not a reason for letting the children die. In terms of praise and blame, we are clearly right to condemn, in the strongest terms, those who do nothing. In contrast, we may withhold such condemnation from those who stop when they have done their fair share. Even so, they have let children drown when they could easily have saved them, and that is wrong.

Similarly, in the real world, it should be seen as a serious moral failure when those with ample income do not do their fair share toward relieving global poverty. It isn’t so easy, however, to decide on the proper approach to take to those who limit their contribution to their fair share when they could easily do more and when, because others are not playing their part, a further donation would assist many in desperate need. In the privacy of our own judgment, we should believe that it is wrong not to do more. But whether we should actually criticize people who are doing their fair share, but no more than that, depends on the psychological impact that such criticism will have on them, and on others. This in turn may depend on social practices. If the majority are doing little or nothing, setting a standard higher than the fair-share level may seem so demanding that it discourages people who are willing to make an equitable contribution from doing even that. So it may be best to refrain from criticizing those who achieve the fair-share level. In moving our society’s standards forward, we may have to progress one step at a time.

For more than 30 years, I’ve been reading, writing and teaching about the ethical issue posed by the juxtaposition, on our planet, of great abundance and life-threatening poverty. Yet it was not until I calculated how much America’s top 10 percent of income earners actually make that I fully understood how easy it would be for the world’s rich to eliminate, or virtually eliminate, global poverty. It has become much easier over the last 30 years, as the rich have grown significantly richer. Measured against our capacity, the Millennium Development Goals are indecently, shockingly modest. If we fail to achieve them ― as on present indications we well might ― we have no excuses. The target we should be setting for ourselves is not halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, and without enough to eat, but ensuring that no one, or virtually no one, needs to live in such degrading conditions. That is a worthy goal, and it is well within our reach.