Global Poverty and Desert

Abstract

Several reasons are offered to explain why global poverty is of no serious moral concern for the affluent of developed countries. Often it is claimed that there are no morally salient connections between our actions and their poverty. In the first part of this article I argue that there are important morally salient connections between the affluent of developed countries and those in poverty. Considerations of desert and (fair) entitlement can bring this into better view. I argue that there are significant problems with the notion of desert that we typically invoke to defend our holdings. When we try to reconstruct a coherent notion of desert, we find we must be committed to a principle of (fair) equality of opportunity, so we must care about people's starting positions and desert-generating processes, in order for any claims of desert to defensibly gain moral recognition.