Abstract
Development economists have suggested that the hopes of the poor are a relevant factor in overcoming poverty. I argue that Kant’s approach to hope provides an important complement to the economists’ perspective. A Kantian account of hope emphasizes the need for the rationality of hope and thereby guards against problematic aspects of the economists’ discourse on hope. Section 1 introduces recent work on hope in development economics. Section 2 clarifies Kant’s question “What may I hope?” and presents the outlines of his answer. Crucially, hope is rational if it is rational to trust in the structures of reality on which the realization of one’s hope depends. Section 3 argues that central tenets of Kant’s account of what makes hope rational can be applied to the context of poverty. It becomes apparent that the poor often have good reason to be hopeless since they may not trust fundamental structures that are necessary for realizing their hope. Thus, the insight that the poor need more hope must go hand in hand with a commitment to establishing trustworthy political structures, such that their hope can be rational. Section 4 highlights the relevance of the secular highest good for a better understanding of the justification and scope of our duties to the poor in a Kantian framework.
Highlights
In this contribution, I approach the problem of global poverty from a novel perspective that has recently caught the interest of development economists
While the economists acknowledge that “there must be a tangible basis for hope that stems from reality” (Lybbert and Wydick 2018a, 154), they suggest that this basis can be improved by providing individuals with assets, or by “cash transfer” (Lybbert and Wydick 2018a, 160), suggesting that the problem concerns one’s individual economic situation
My thesis is that Kant offers an account of hope that allows us to appreciate its relevance to the problem of poverty without individualizing it
Summary
Development economics has focused on improving external conditions such as infrastructure, the health system and education in order to alleviate poverty. Lybbert and Wydick acknowledge that hope often contains both “wishful” and “aspirational” elements (Lybbert and Wydick, 713), but their focus on aspirational hope (which combines “efficacious effort” and being “optimistically directed toward” the goal) suggests that they view the hoped-for outcome as largely within the control of the hoper This assumption may be problematic, especially in the context of poverty. Note that for Kant, (rational) faith or trust in God’s existence makes hope rational but psychologically possible He illustrates this in the third Critique, where he describes “a righteous man (like Spinoza) who takes himself to be firmly convinced that there is no God and [...] no future life” (5:452). This strategy does not generally seem to be applicable in the context of poverty, to which I turn
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