SEMINAR: Global Poverty, Moral Psychology and Judgments about Charitable Giving

Luke Buckland (Rutgers University) with Carissa Veliz (City University of New York), David Rodriguez-Arias (Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council), Meena Krishnamurthy (University of Manitoba), Matthew Lindauer (Yale University), and Boris Yakubchik.

 Two kinds of philosophical arguments are commonly used to persuade people to fulfill their moral duties to the poor. The first kind appeals to "positive" duties.

Peter Singer argues that if it's in our power to prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything of moral relevance, we are morally bound to do it (Singer, 1972; 2009).

This general principle of beneficence exhorts us to aid others even when their misfortunes are not of our making. The second kind of argument appeals to "negative" duties.

Thomas Pogge argues that as a result of a violent history, uncompensated exclusion from global resources, and an unjust institutional order, we (the affluent) have violated our negative duty not to cause harm.

We thus owe compensation for contributing to and benefiting from wrongs perpetrated on the poor (Pogge, 2001). While Pogge does not reject positive duties, he instead invokes what he considers to be the more stringent obligations we owe the worst-off due to our (perhaps unwitting) complicity in their abjection. For Singer, our positive moral duty towards the hungry holds regardless of the source of that hunger; for Pogge, our negative duty holds because that hunger is at least in part our crime.

Although both arguments aim to persuade us that we ought to act, their relative motivational effectiveness has not been subject to empirical test.

This is in spite of frequent claims in the philosophical literature that the appeal to negative duties is more morally motivating than the appeal to positive duties (e.g. Lawford-Smith, 2012).

We have conducted a series of between-subjects experimental surveys of the comparative impact of these two argument types on participants' moral judgments about their duties to the global poor, as well as on their resulting propensity to give charitably. In a cross-cultural analysis, the moral intuitions of US and Spanish undergraduates were elicited after their exposure to either a positive or negative duty-based intervention, developed from the work of Singer and Pogge respectively. In response to a randomly assigned argument-vignette pair, participants predicted their own future rate of giving and made judgments about their moral duties to give charitably. In a separate online survey of US volunteers, participants donated their own money in response to one of the two types of arguments. A third, ongoing study, investigates interactions between the argument types and participants' sense of guilt, control and efficacy in addressing global poverty.

 This series of studies thus aims to measure the relative persuasive power of these two very different kinds of moral appeal, and to assess their impact on the moral judgments and motivation of several socioculturally distinct populations. Besides revealing how the public might be more effectively encouraged to re-conceptualize the problem of global poverty, the study promises to shed more light on the folk psychology of moral cognition.

Where: Departmental Seminar Room

When: Wednesday 15 May 2013

Time: 15h30 - 17h00