Theories on Global Poverty. Normative Disclosure and Consistency

Abstract

Beyond some (non-trivial) disagreements as to how to count the poor and how to measure poverty, there is a wide consensus that overcoming global poverty is one of the most fundamental moral challenges of our time. Thus far the agreement is quite clear, but it also stops here. Opinions drastically differ about the nature and scope of the failure involved in global poverty and about the ways to overcome it. The map of those opinions and theories is complex and includes both empirical and normative disagreements. One striking feature of these controversies is the lack of communication between those who work on normative issues (philosophers) and those concerned with empirical ones (social scientists, economists). Such lack of communication is puzzling because one would expect that the problem has both normative and empirical aspects and that they are interrelated. The main purpose of this paper is to take a first step toward remedying this failure by clarifying some aspects of the relationship between the normative and empirical components of any (plausible) theory of global justice that shares that global poverty is morally wrong (or bad) and should be eradicated. From my analysis it will follow that leading theories on global justice fail to connect these components adequately.