In 1972 the philosopher Peter Singer presented a thought experiment: if you saw a child drowning in a shallow body of water and you could easily save it without any harm to yourself beyond getting your feet wet, would you do it? It’s hard to imagine anyone wouldn’t answer “of course”. Next, Singer asks: what if there was a child starving in a far-away country, and you could save it with just a small donation that made little difference to your well-being (almost like getting your feet wet). Would you do that? The reality is that for many people the answer to the second question is no. Singer used the apparent disanalogy in the thought experiment to make a powerful argument that what we normally think of as charity is actually a duty—we should feel just as obliged to help distant others in dire need as we do to help a drowning child in front of us.

 Over forty years later Singer’s argument is still as relevant as it was when he wrote it. Although global abject poverty had been in decline there are still millions of people living on less than a dollar a day and thousands of children dying from preventable illnesses associated with poverty. Do we have a duty to help if we can? And if so, what form should this help take?

For Singer, the answer is simply yes we have a duty, and we should fulfil it by giving as much as we can to charitable organizations aimed at alleviating the suffering of the world’s least advantaged.

Although this is surely a commendable aim, we might argue, along with some of Singer’s critics, that individual giving does little to eliminate the structural issues that cause some individuals to live in poverty while others thrive. A more structural approach to targeting global poverty which views it as a global systemic issue is the one taken by the United Nations, through its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  Goal number one on the list is to end global poverty, and like each of the other 17 goals, poverty is understood as a complex issue that can’t be addressed in isolation which requires international cooperation to solve—even more so in the midst of the global public health crisis. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres said when introducing a new COVID-19 response brief, the pandemic has revealed “yawning gaps in social protection and major structural inequalities within and between countries” and he underscored the critical linkages between public health and broader economic and societal resilience.

Yet, recognizing that global poverty is a structural problem and doing something to address are two very different things. Although the UN and its Member States are committed to addressing these major structural inequalities that lead to abject poverty for many individuals around the world, there is only so much they can do.

Under international law, the primary responsibility for the social and economic wellbeing of individuals falls to their own governments. Further, there is little that the international community can do to alleviate the structural inequalities within nations, and there is certainly no binding international law that would help address structural inequalities between them.

 Does this inability mean that the onus falls back to individual citizens to help, perhaps as Singer suggested, by giving to charities that help the world’s poor, or by pressuring their governments and elected officials to get more involved? Or should international institutions like the UN be given more power to redistribute wealth in order to target poverty? Or maybe it is the responsibility of the many multinational corporations operating in impoverished areas to give back to their host communities?

Professor Valentina Gentile, who teaches a course on Global Justice at Luiss, says that “the problem is complex, and requires efforts from many different levels—individual citizens, domestic and even NGOs are asked to respond to this major challenge of our age. While most everyone agrees that this is certainly not something that can be solved at the domestic level alone, to what extent other actors have the responsibility to get involved is an important topic of debate in international political theory.” In Professor Gentile’s class, which is taught as part of the Diplomacy tract of the Master’s in IR and available as an elective, students learn to critically engage with pressing real-world philosophical issues such as these.  

Singer wrote his article Famine Affluence and Morality (where the famous though experiment comes from) in the aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War, when mass starvation caused thousands to lose their lives and put pressure on the international community to respond. Today, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the issue of how we can cooperate to solve global issues like poverty, climate change and the spread of infectious disease is once again front and center in international debates. Although it is generally in times of crisis that we start seriously thinking about the nature of our responsibilities to one another and the prospects for global cooperation, these issues effect us all, even in calmer times. The importance of the theoretical investigations into issues like poverty and global cooperation conducted at universities like Luiss can’t be understated.