The easy moral problem ?

Easy moral problem – You have money, a person is hungry and asks you for money for food. I have categorized this problem as an easy moral problem because to me, it seems like a no-brainer. After all, ostensibly, there is sufficient food production for all of the world’s population of nearly 7 billion. If everyone who has money gives enough to those who can’t afford food, it should be a reasonably easy distribution problem to solve, barring some logistical problems having to do with transporting food around the world, responding to famines etc. Also, there are the examples of developed countries that have eliminated poverty.

However, it isn’t clear if at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the majority of mankind sees the last problem as an easy moral problem. In fact, mankind seems almost hopelessly lost when it comes to this problem. Six million kids die every year from preventable causes like minor diseases and malnutrition. Billions live at the edge of poverty, barely eking out a living, and not getting sufficient nutrition.

There are several reasons why this state of affairs continues. There is paranoia about “growth” and “efficiency”. One argument of the paranoids could go like this. If there is too much charity for food, a large proportion of the working population will stop working. Growth will suffer and the economy will contract. There will be less money overall, and taken to its logical conclusion, it will lead to starvation for everybody. This extreme argument is wrong because of very simple economic efficiency reasons, and also simply because it doesn’t make sense.

Another argument could go as follows. Capitalistic enterprises are efficient. Anything not driven by the profit motive, like a charity, is inefficient. Therefore, I won’t give money to charities. Sounds okay ? It may sound okay for some charities, but it is untenable when it comes to something as basic as food.

Yet another argument could go like this. I don’t know if charitable organizations and NGOs are honest. I would rather spend my money on an expensive luxury item. At least I know that I am giving it to somebody honest, that is, the store owner. This argument fails both because it is dumb and because there are reasonable number of high-profile and reputable charities and NGOs like the World Food Program that work to provide food to the poor.

The other reason may have to do with paranoia about economic competition and the way it can affect one’s progenies. If those living at the edge of poverty are given too much help, they will become competitors for jobs. This argument could be especially potent in resource-strapped countries like India. If the size of the pie isn’t increasing fast, the privileged may think it’s not a good idea that the poor should come up too fast. Even if the size of the pie is increasing fast due to high growth at the top, the privileged may again think it’s a good idea to not empower the poor because they can pose a threat by competing for jobs at the top. Of course, this argument works for things like education, but not for food. However, in people’s minds, the problems of educating the poor, feeding the poor and healing the poor become bundled into one problem – that of caring for the poor, and thereby empowering them. So, even something as basic as food security may get neglected. This line of thinking takes a very cynical view of the way people think, but there are enough reports that it operates at many levels. For example, higher castes do their utmost to keep the lower castes poor in many villages in India, according to reports in the media.

The other reason may have to do with an “ out of sight, out of mind “ kind of thing. The vast majority of the well-to-do population thinks it is the responsibility of the government to ensure minimum standards of living for the poor. However, the political establishments that run the government may not have it in their priority list. This becomes especially significant when the number of poor is large, but forms a minority. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith analyzed this problem of minority poor. If the bottom 30% are poor, they don’t form enough of a vote bank to threaten reactionary establishments, especially if they aren’t well-organized and are uneducated, and are divided along lines like religion and caste in a country like India. The problem with the “ out of sight, out of mind “ thing is that while it may or may not absolve the vast majority of the well-to-do, it definitely doesn’t absolve the intelligentsia and the political elite. In the modern world, the uplift of the poor is ultimately the responsibility of the educated elite, and that too, primarily that of those who analyze and frame policies. If this elite is lazy, apathetic or stupid, the emancipation of the poor happens very slowly.

The “ out of sight, out of mind “ mechanism plays a very important role when it comes to the problem of getting rich countries to help poor countries that are very much cash-strapped and resource strapped, and caught in vicious cycles. For example, while President George W. Bush made a commitment that the US will contribute 0.7% of its annual GDP to the Millenium Development goals, the actual sum has never materialized because Congessional budget allocations are caught in massive wranglings about domestic spending, and voters are impatient about results at home first before they worry about foreign countries. But a large portion of the same population may support expensive wars in foreign countries based on justifications like “ spreading democracy “ or “ protecting democracy “. Somehow, poverty isn’t glamorous enough to make it to the top of the concern list.

Another example of the “ out of sight, out of mind “ mechanism is the burning of grains in North American prairies while people starved elsewhere in the world. This kind of co-operative efforts designed to raise food-grain prices have happened in the past. Instead of burning the grains, they could have been contributed to some kind of food security fund ( may be one run by the United Nations ) that gave food to starving people in remote areas of the world, basically ensuring moral outcomes while allowing the farmers in rich countries to avoid economic losses. However, widespread apathy and insouciance meant that destruction of this basic necessity of life was the outcome rather than the more humane option of transfer of food-grains to the utterly poor.

Yet another example of the “ out of sight, out of mind “ mechanism is the large-scale diversion of food-grains towards alcohol for automobile fuels. Since food-grains serve as close substitutes for each other, this leads to an increase in food prices worldwide. People at the edge of poverty are pushed further into poverty, and starvation becomes more widespread. There is an almost blind belief in the ability of markets to bring benefits to all. Basic common-sense moral problems like alleviation of mass starvation remain neglected.

There is another strange strand of thinking that asserts that only free-market capitalism and trickle-through can solve the problems of poverty, even in disease-ridden and starvation-ridden countries. This makes no sense, of course, since people that are suffering from malaria and AIDS, and people that are grossly malnourished, are not and cannot be meaningful parts of any kind of economy, let alone capitalism, till these fundamental problems are taken care of. However, this line of thinking provides a convenient intellectual cover for people that want to prevent egalitarian measures out of selfishness or sadism.

So, the moral problem of alleviation of starvation and malnutrition is, de facto, a difficult problem to solve in the world we inhabit ( although some countries have a much better record in this area than others ). At first blush, it looks like a slam dunk, but the record of countries like India, which haven’t been able to make good progress in this area over the past 60 years, shows that it is a much more intractable problem than what one would naively expect. The one strong conclusion that emerges from this is that selfishness and hypocrisy trump more humane instincts in human affairs to an extent that should be distasteful to civilized society.