1POVERTY AND HUMANITY: INDIVIDUAL DUTIES AND THE MORAL POINT OF VIEW

It is a fact that millions of people live in severe poverty and die each year from starvation. The 46 percent of humankind live below the $2/day poverty line, and over a 1,214 million of them live below the $1/day poverty line1. About 18 million of extreme poor people die each year from poverty-related causes (one-third of all human deaths). At the same time, it is also a fact that poverty is not inevitable in a world where the global production of food is twice the amount that would be necessary to feed the total population. The cost of eradicating extreme starvation is less than 1 percent of the global income, and the cost of providing universal access to basic social services and transfers to alleviate absolute poverty would cost $ 80 billion, less that the wealth of the seven richest men in the world 2. I guess that for the majority of us these data are spine-chilling. Certainly, statistics about destitution are always moving, and the normal reaction to them is of regret and concern3. Nevertheless, the reality is that income differences between the most affluent population and the poorest are actually increasing, rather than diminishing, and that all this is taking place despite our impressive technological progress and the success of human rights discourse in Western democracies4. Perhaps what explains our global collective inaction concerning this problem is not mere indifference to others ’ suffering, but rather the widespread belief that we, people from affluent countries, do not really have a moral duty to help those who are dying of hunger far from us. We may feel certainly compelled to engage in charitable acts, and we do deeply value people making this kind of effort, but the inaction toward the starving population is not perceived as a moral fault. Global scale problems, we could say, are not a real concern in our common-sense morality because, as Samuel 1 It is also important to highlight that this 46 percent of the population has only 1.2 percent of the global income. I am using here Pogge’s summary (2002, 97) of data coming from the World Ban