Poverty and Food: Why Charity is Not Enough
Files
Description
Although the world food situation raises acute problems of distributive justice, they are not comparable to problems about how to distribute a definite quantity of food that is already on hand to numerous hungry victims of a natural calamity. Because of the significant effects of distribution on production, and the impossibility of separating the distribution of food from that of wealth in general, there is no isolable question of justice about redistribution of food from the haves to the have-nots. In a sense, therefore, the ethical aspects of this topic can be discussed only as part of the general problem of global economic inequality. In a money economy, anything can be exchanged for anything else, and the issue of the distribution of food is inseparable from that of the distribution of transistors or power plants. Nevertheless there is a reason for thinking about the larger question in terms of food. Food is basic. It is the last thing an individual can afford to give up, if he can afford nothing else, and this means that in the current world situation we are not dealing with an abstract problem of inequality, but with something more specific and acute. If everyone in the world had at least a minimally adequate standard of living, there would still be ethical problems about the justice of big differences in wealth above that minimum as there are, for example, about the distribution of wealth within the United States. But whatever may be said about this general problem, the inequalities that appear in the distribution of food on a worldwide scale are of a very different kind, and raise a different issue. They are, to be sure, basically inequalities in wealth rather than in food; but inequalities in wealth and income which result in starvation or severe malnutrition for some are in a different moral class from those inequalities higher on the scale that result in luxuries and multiple dwellings for some and marginal poverty for others. When the subject is enough to eat rather than a yacht, the difference between haves and have-nots goes beyond the general problem of equality and distributive justice. It is an extreme case, involving extreme needs.
Source Publication
Food Policy: The Responsibility of the United States in the Life and Death Choices
Source Editors/Authors
Peter G. Brown, Henry Shue
Publication Date
1977
Recommended Citation
Nagel, Thomas, "Poverty and Food: Why Charity is Not Enough" (1977). Faculty Chapters. 1329.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1329
