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When I talk about a human right to subsistence I am referring to a moral pre-institutional right. The right to subsistence is also a legal human right that has been affirmed in many human rights documents and covenants, most notably in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Joel Feinberg defines rights, particularly claim-rights as valid claims, justified within a system of rules that logically entail other people’s duties; see “The Nature and Value of Rights”, The Journal of Value Inquiry (1970) Volume, 4, Issue 4: 243–260 at 249.
Onora O’Neill repeats this argument in several places. See Faces of Hunger (Allen & Unwin, 1986), 100; Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge, 1996); “Global justice: whose obligations?” in The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy, ed. Deen K. Chatterjee (Cambridge, 2004); and “The Dark Side of Human Rights,” International Affairs 81 (2005); 427–39. For a more recent version of this line of criticism see Simon Hope, “Subsistence Needs, Human Rights, and Imperfect Duties,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 30, 1 (2013): 88–100.
Another strategy is to deny that claimability is an existence condition of a right. See John Tasioulas, “The Moral Reality of Human Rights,” ed. Pogge, Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who owes what to the very poor (Oxford, 2007): 75–102. Following Tasioulas, Adam Etinson also denies that we need to satisfy the requirements of claimability (i.e., by trying to make certain details about their content, holders and duty-bearers known). Whether or not Tasioulas and Etinson are right about this, I aim to show that the human right to subsistence is indeed sufficiently claimable. See Etinson, “Human Rights, Claimability, and the Uses of Abstraction” in Utilitas 25, 4 (December 2013): pp. 463–486.
There are several different types of duties that correspond to the right to subsistence. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on the positive duties to aid that are typically understood as imperfect duties. My claim is not that the duty to aid is never an imperfect one, it generally is; however, I will argue that, sometimes, in certain circumstances (such as current conditions of global poverty), it has the structure of a perfect duty. Other types of duties that correspond to the right to subsistence include negative (perfect) individual duties and negative collective duties. For an excellent account of negative collective duties see Thomas Pogge, “Severe Poverty as a Human Rights Violation” and Elizabeth Ashford, “The Duties Imposed by the Human Right to Basic Necessities,” both found in Pogge’s volume Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who owes what to the very poor? See also Ashford, “Severe Poverty as a Systemic Human Rights Violation” in Gillian Brock, ed. Cosmopolitanism Versus Non-cosmopolitanism: Critiques, Defenses, Reconceptualizations (Oxford, 2013): 129–157. Ashford also recognizes that the human right to basic necessity imposes positive duties. I take my view to be broadly consistent with hers especially to the extent that she understands the duties imposed as shared duties. See footnote 21 for some important differences.
I will refer to those of us who have the capacity to aid as “the affluent”. I use this term for want of a better one and just mean by it persons who have secure access to their own basic needs and the needs of their dependents and have the resources to help others. In this paper I consider the situation from the perspective of an affluent individual, asking what my duty is and whether the right to subsistence provides moral guidance. In actual fact, the poor themselves will have an important role in structuring and implementing a solution.
Zofia Stemploska adopts another approach. She argues that the person in need can claim the right against any individual of her choosing who has not sufficiently contributed to her duty to the needy. See, Stemploska, “On the Real World Duties Imposed on Us by Human Rights,” Journal of Social Philosophy 40, 4 (2009): 466–487.
Much of the controversy on the validity of welfare rights rests on an assumption that liberty rights are negative rights requiring only that we not interfere with others whereas welfare rights are positive rights requiring positive performance. Following Henry Shue’s argument in Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, 1980), it is now commonly accepted that the distinction between negative and positive rights is not as rigid since there are positive and negative duties correlated to both of these rights.
O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, 134.
O’Neill makes these points in several places. See “Women’s Rights: whose obligations” Chapter 5 in The Bounds of Justice (Cambridge, 2000) and Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning, Chapter 5. Her point is not so much that an account that starts with rights is “blind to obligations without counterpart rights, but that it obscures what is really at stake by focusing on rights rather than obligations” (Bounds of Justice, 99).
David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice, (Oxford, 2007): 98.
Remedial responsibility is responsibility for remedying wrongs or harms that have occurred. While Miller’s principles allocate remedial responsibility for past wrongs, I will consider whether we can extend them to also shed light on how we might allocate forward-looking obligations to fulfill our duties that correspond to the human right to subsistence.
Miller acknowledges that making the person who is morally responsible for the deprivation pay for it is a way of expressing blame, so we have strong independent moral reasons for assigning remedial responsibility on the basis of moral responsibility (100).
Miller, 107.
Robert Goodin, “States as Institutional Consolidators of Imperfect Duties” unpublished manuscript which further develops the view he sets out (with Charles Beitz) in the introduction to Global Basic Rights, ed. Beitz and Goodin (Oxford, 2009). For another recent and excellent example of an institutional approach to making duties determinate, see Jaakko Kuosmanen “Perfecting Imperfect Duties: The Institutionalisation of a Universal Right to Asylum” in Journal of Political Philosophy 21, 1 (2013): 24–43.
Henry Shue, “Mediating Duties” in Ethics, Vol. 98, No. 4 (Jul., 1988): 687–704.
Goodin, 5.
Goodin, 5.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 4.
See Simon Hope in “Kantian Imperfect Duties and Modern Debates over Human Rights,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 22, 4 (2014): 396–415 at 414. Hope claims that “there is no possible route of conversion from imperfect duty on Kant’s account” (404). He argues that the strategy of perfecting imperfect duties is flawed and rests on a conflation between the Kantian account of imperfect duty and a modern liberal account. I do not take issue with Hope’s argument nor do I think my account falls prey to it because I do not convert imperfect individual duties into perfect ones but rather show that we should conceive of the duty to aid the global poor as a collective duty from the outset.
This is not to say that a plausible Kantian view should not pursue institutional means of fulfilling our imperfect duties. I just question conceptually equating the two.
Collective duties can be considered perfect duties but they are not determinate in the same way that individual perfect duties are – where there is a one-to-one mapping between the agent and the required action. In this case, the “one-to-one” mapping is between the collective agent and the collective action.
Ashford pursues a different strategy. She argues that, in the absence of just institutions, many negative duties imposed by human rights are, in fact, imperfect duties “in just the same way as positive duties of aid” (“The Duties Imposed by the Human Right to Basic Necessities”, 185). Her point is that when these negative duties are not straightforwardly claimable, we do not question the genuineness of the corresponding right. Similarly, some positive duties are imperfect (and not straightforwardly claimable) and also correspond to a genuine right. While we may not agree on all the details, I share her main conclusions. Namely that, in the case of the right to subsistence, there is “genuine claimability” since the claim that can be made against the affluent by victims of the system is not “empty” (216). And also that, the human right to subsistence articulates a demand each victim can make against all who participate or who are not doing enough to implement their share of the shared duty (215–16).
There are competing interpretations of imperfect duties. On my view, imperfect duties are duties to adopt certain ends. As a consequence, their structure provides agents with latitude in terms of how to fulfill it. My focus in this paper is on the structural differences O’Neill emphasizes between perfect duties (with counterpart rights) and imperfect duties (which lack counterpart rights).
Pablo Gilabert argues, on Kantian grounds, that the duty to aid the needy is a positive duty of justice with global scope. See “Kant and the Claims of the Poor,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXXXI, No. 2 (September 2010): 382–418. Gilabert also thinks we can construct specific duties of basic assistance that are perfect by specifying the circumstances of application (396). I take his approach to be similar to mine except that I do not take my view to “construct” a perfect duty--the collective duty to aid already has that structure.
Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1,3 (1972): 229–243.
While the justification of the duty is the same as the imperfect duty to aid the needy, in this case where there is a specific person capable of carrying out the rescue, the structure of the duty is perfect. Violetta Igneski, "Perfect and Imperfect Duties To Aid," Social Theory and Practice 32, 3 (2006): 439–466.
Larry May, Virginia Held and Tracy Isaacs explore similar examples and draw similar conclusions about the existence of a shared duty. See May, Sharing Responsibility (Chicago, 1992); Held, “Can a Random Collection of Individuals be Morally Responsible?,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 67, No. 14 (July 1970): 471–481; Isaacs, “Collective Responsibility and Collective Obligation” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXXVIII, 2014: 40–57.
World Bank “Poverty and Equity Data”, 2012.
See Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Polity Press, 2002).
I am assuming that by working together severe poverty is a problem we can get under control. Economist Jeffrey Sachs argues that we can end extreme global poverty in our lifetimes in The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (Penguin Books, 2005). Pogge estimates that $320 billion annually is needed to make substantial progress on eradicating extreme poverty which is only 0.71% of the global product or 0.90% of the combined GNIs of the affluent countries (“Severe Poverty as a Human Rights Violation”, 28).
It is possible that a particular individual can sufficiently aid a particular needy person and bring her out of poverty, but I am thinking about global poverty as a collective global problem that requires the assistance and cooperation of (almost) everyone to end.
Liam Murphy has argued that beneficence is a cooperative project with each of us being morally required to do our fair share in “The Demands of Beneficence”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (4) (1993): 267–292.
For a compelling response to the agency objection see Bill Wringe in “From Global Collective Obligations to Institutional Obligations,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXXVIII(2014): 171–186.
There is an extensive literature on collective responsibility and collective intentions. Here I follow Isaacs’s view of collective responsibility in Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts.
See Isaacs in “Collective Responsibility and Collective Obligation”. She credits the idea of putative groups or putative collective agents to Larry May, “Collective Inaction and Collective Responsibility,” ed., Peter French, Individual and Collective Responsibility, 1998. The idea is that the group of individuals is a putative collective agent before they come together and act together.
Isaacs, “Collective Responsibility”, 44–5.
Ibid., 40.
Ibid., 479.
Imagine in the coordinated bystander case that only three of the bystanders are needed to effect the rescue. We would only know this after we consider the capacities of the four taken together and work out what each individual’s role is. There may be a solution that involves an onerous burden for one person, a light burden for two others, and nothing for the fourth. This does not mean the fourth person can leave and go home. She should remain willing to provide any support or aid, should it become necessary.
Tasioulas, 98.
Etinson makes a compelling argument about the uses and benefits of the abstractness of rights (e.g., they can be specified in culturally appropriate and contextually sensitive ways) in “Human Rights, Claimability and the Uses of Abstraction”, section V.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to Tracy Isaacs, Wil Waluchow, Arthur Ripstein, Judith Lichtenberg, Kit Wellman, Alistair McLeod and Stefan Sciaraffa for their very helpful feedback. I presented an earlier version of this paper at the Canadian Philosophy Association Annual Meeting at Brock University in 2014 and received excellent comments from Alistair McLeod.
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Igneski, V. The Human Right to Subsistence and the Collective Duty to Aid. J Value Inquiry 51, 33–50 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-016-9552-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-016-9552-y