THE DUTY TO RELIEVE POVERTY (original) (raw)
Related papers
Kantian Right and Poverty Relief
Ethic@, 2014
I have two goals in this paper. First, I want to determine whether Kant’s justification for state programs for poverty relief in The Doctrine of Right is based on 1) Kantian duties of virtue, 2) Kantian duties of right, or instead merely on 3) instrumental arguments regarding the preservation of a State as such. I claim that the last alternative is the correct one. Second, I will argue, against Kant himself, that even his merely instrumental arguments for public programs for poverty relief are ruled out by his doctrine of right. My conclusion is that, perhaps surprisingly, the only genuinely Kantian way to provide poverty relief is privately, just as Libertarians have argued.
A Kantian Argument against World Poverty (European Journal of Political Theory)
Immanuel Kant is recognized as one of the first philosophers who wrote systematically about global justice and world peace. In the current debate on global justice he is mostly appealed to by critics of extensive duties of global justice. However, I show in this paper that an analysis of Kant’s late work on rights and justice provides ample resources for disagreeing with those who take Kant to call for only modest changes in global politics. Kant’s comments in the Doctrine of Right clarify that he thinks we need a coercively enforced global civil condition. But his work also contains ideas that imply that within such a global legal order there must be no extreme forms of poverty and inequality, and that the current holdings of states are by no means conclusive possessions without confirmation by the global legal order we have a duty to establish. Thus, this paper challenges the prevailing interpretation of Kant as a conservative thinker about global justice that is held, for instance, by the leading contemporary liberal thinkers such as John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, and Ronald Dworkin.
Dialogue – Canadian Philosophical Review, 2006
Contrary to much Kant interpretation, this article argues that Kant's moral philosophy, including his account of charity, is irrelevant to justifying the state's right to redistribute material resources to secure the rights of dependents (the poor, children, and the impaired). The article also rejects the popular view that Kant either does not or cannot justify anything remotely similar to the liberal welfare state. A closer look at Kant's account of dependency relations in "The Doctrine of Right" reveals an argumentative structure sufficient for a public institutional protection of dependents and evidence that Kant identifies concerns of economic justice as lying at the heart of the state's legitimacy.
A Kantian Moral Response to Poverty
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2023
Poverty is a global problem that is not only about material deprivation, but also a lack of agency and power. A Kantian response, with its focus on supporting the conditions of agency and empowerment, seems well suited to providing individuals with normative guidance on what their obligations are. The problem is that the guidance one finds within Kantian ethics is focused on the individual duty to aid or the duty to rescue, both of which have limited application in the context of a complex, wide-ranging and structural problem like poverty. Individuals, on their own, are unable to end poverty and they cannot adopt this as an end of theirs. But if they get together with enough others, things look a lot more promising. Even though a fully Kantian response to poverty requires exploring his legal philosophy and the role of the state, I focus here on the moral obligations of individuals, particularly the idea that by joining together we have increased capacity to respond and make a difference. If we start with certain assumptions about capacity and agency; namely that “ought implies can” and “only agents are duty-bearers”, it is not clear that collectives that are not (yet) agents—such as “humanity” or “the affluent” or “the poor”—are possible duty-bearers. The aim of this paper is to support a more expansive account of Kantian moral obligations in which unstructured collectives have moral duties and their individual members have duties both to help form effective collective agents, and also to fulfill their shares of the collective duty to end poverty.
"What Kant would have said in the refugee crisis"
The paper outlines the systematic work that would have to be done in order to answer the title question. It starts from cosmopolitan right as natural right and asks what kinds of transformations cosmopolitan natural right would have to undergo to form a legitimate part of public international law.
Kant's Cosmopolitan Right and the Rights of Others
Kant's understanding of Cosmopolitan Right, elaborated in the Third Article of his essay on "Perpetual Peace" and The Metaphysics of Morals, enjoys considerable attention today under the current conditions of the refugee crisis and globalization. Geneva Convention's principle of "non¬refoulement" concerning the Status of Refugees mainly relies on Kant's claim that first entry should always be granted to those who are in danger. The paper will focus first on the distinction Kant makes between "the right to be a permanent visitor" and the "temporary right of sojourn." Though the Kantian hospitality "is not a question of philanthropy but of right," yet it is confined to a claim to temporary residency.
When the strictest right is the greatest wrong: Kant on Fairness
Estudos Kantianos [EK]
In this paper, I put forward an interpretation of the Kantian state that offers an alternative to the traditionalminimalist and to recent welfare interpretations of the Kantian state. I show that although the Kantian state has no duty to redistribute, Kant’s conception of equity or fairness (Billigkeit, MS RL VI: 234) allows the state to recognize redistribution as belonging to the ideal republic (republica noumenon), towards which all states have a non-coercible obligation to strive. I back up my interpretation with passages of the Metaphysics of Morals and of Kant’s lectures in which Kant questions the character of the duty of beneficence as a meritorious duty, given the fact that need is often the result of previous injustice of governments. The problem is that although the destitute have a right to collective aid, unlike strict right, these rights cannot be juridically enforced. This has led to the wrong conclusion that the state or the supreme commander has a duty of virtue tow...