International aid: When giving becomes a vice

Social Philosophy and Policy

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 69-101

  Badhwar, Neera K ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA   (United States)

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EID: 33644928985     PISSN: 02650525     EISSN: 14716437     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0265052506060031     Document Type: Review

References (135)

1. See Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972): 229-43, revised version at http://www.petersingerlinks.com/famine.htm;
2. Singer, Practical Ethics, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 230;
3. Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002);
4. Singer, "The Bread Which You Withhold Belongs to the Hungry: Attitudes to Poverty," http:// www.iadb.org/etica/documentos/dc_sin_elpan- i.htm (2003);
5. Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). All further references to Singer's "Famine" are to the revised version.
6. Oxfam is an abbreviation for the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief.
7. See, e.g., the essays in Dale Jamieson, ed., Singer and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1999)
8. See, for example, Peter Singer, "Should We Let Them Starve?" New Humanist, June 1974;
9. Singer, "The Right to Be Rich or Poor," The New York Review of Books, March 6, 1975;
10. Singer, "Greed Is Stupid," Australian Business Monthly, March 1992, 78-81;
11. Singer, "Not What You Produce, But How Much You Spend," Modern Times, March 1992, 16-17
12. and Singer, "The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle," New Internationalist, April 1997, 28-30.
13. "Compassionate" conservatism in the United States seems obviously to be a response to the public adulation of "generous" politicians; and the belief in the "saintliness" of Mother Teresa, based almost entirely on uncritical acceptance of her own claims and those of a few hagiographers, persists despite the vast evidence for the fact that very little of the tens of millions she received in donations every year worldwide was spent on the care of the poor. Instead, nearly all of it was spent either directly on missionary work or repatriated to the Vatican for its missionary work. The evidence comes from former nuns, lay helpers in her missions, and the poor of Calcutta, including those in the immediate vicinity of her homes in the city. The results are reported and discussed in books and articles based on years of research. See, in particular, Aroup Chatterjee, Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict (Kolkata, India: Meteor Books, 2003), http://www.meteorbooks.com/ index.html;
14. Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, reprint ed. (New York: Verso, 1997);
15. Hitchens, "Less than Miraculous," Free Inquiry 24, no. 2 (2004), http://www. secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_24_2.html;
16. Susan Shields, "Mother Teresa's House of Illusions," Free Inquiry 18, no. 1 (1997/1998), http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/ fi/shields_18_1.html;
17. and Walter Wuellenweber, "Mother Teresa: Where Are Her Millions?" Stern, September 10, 1998 (English translation available at http://are.berkeley.edu/~atanu/ Writing/teresa.html and http: / /members.lycos.co.uk/bajuu).
18. Before the publication of Chatterjee's book, Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali produced a documentary based on Chatterjee's research called Hall's Angel for Britain's Channel 4. Hitchens also accused Mother Teresa of celebrating suffering instead of alleviating it. A nice summary of the findings in these works and in the works of other investigators may be found online at "Missionaries of Charity," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Missionaries_of_Charity,
19. and "Mother Teresa," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Mother_Teresa.
20. A somewhat different perspective is provided by Clifford Orwin in "Compassion and Christian Charity: Princess Diana versus Mother Teresa," in Amy L. Kass, ed., The Perfect Gift: The Philanthropic Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 188-211. Orwin argues that although it is true that Mother Teresa did not do much to help relieve suffering, and thus was not charitable in the modern meaning of the term, she did help sufferers see Christ in their suffering and take joy in it as a path to redemption, and thus was charitable in the original meaning of the term. This, however, does not exempt her from criticism. When a person refuses to relieve the suffering of another because, according to her own beliefs and wishes, not those of the sufferer, suffering will bring the sufferer closer to Christ, her "charity" is cruel and immoral.
21. Of course, in all these cases the motivations for the praise are more diverse than I have described them here, including both self-interest or envy (on the part of the worse-off) and guilt (on the part of the better-off).
22. See, for example, Richard Arneson, "Moral Limits on the Demands of Beneficence?" in Deen K. Chatterjee, ed., The Ethics of Assistance: Morality, Affluence, and the Distant Needy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 33-58;
23. Thomas W. Pogge, "Real World Justice," Journal of Ethics 9, nos. 1-2 (2005): 29-53,
24. reprinted in an abbreviated form as "A Cosmopolitan Perspective on the Global Economic Order," in Harry Brighouse and Gillian Brock, eds., The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 92-109;
25. and Thomas W. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Maiden: Blackwell Publishers, 2002).
26. Pogge's main theme in these works, however, is not the positive duty to aid but the negative duty to change the global economic order which, he argues, is unjust and partly responsible for much of the poverty of the developing world. In "Duties to the Distant: Aid, Assistance, and Intervention in the Developing World," Journal of Ethics 9, nos. 1-2 (2005): 151-70,
27. Dale Jamieson argues that aid, both governmental and private, has been harmful overall to its recipients, but takes pains to state that if this were not the case, he would accept Singer's view of the duty to assist. In "Famine Relief: The Duties We Have to Others," in Andrew I. Cohen and Christopher H. Wellman, eds., Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 313-25,
28. Christopher Heath Wellman defends Singer's "less demanding principle" that we have a positive duty to give to famine relief "until we sacrifice something 'morally significant'," but rejects the "more demanding principle that we ought to contribute until we are sacrificing something 'morally comparable'" (323 n. 1). In The Moral Demands of Affluence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004),
29. Garrett Cullity argues that beneficence requires giving of one's time or money to the cause of global poverty or some other comparable philanthropic cause, but rejects the view that its demands are as high as Singer and Unger claim. (Unfortunately, the book came out too late for me to take its arguments into account.) In his review of Unger's Living High and Letting Die ("Sacrificing for the Good of Strangers-Repeatedly," Philosophy and Phenomiinological Research 59, no. 1 [1999]: 177-81),
30. Brad Hooker argues that we face a dilemma: accepting an endless duty to give to the world's needy can seem counterintuitively demanding, but rejecting it "can seem counterintuitively mean" (181). Among those who have questioned the ideal qua ideal are Fred Feldman, "Review of Unger's Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence," Noûs 32, no. 1 (1998): 138-47;
31. Feldman, "Comments on Living High and Letting Die," Philsophy and Phenomenological Research 59, no. 1 (1999): 195-201;
32. David Schmidtz, "Islands in a Sea of Obligation: Limits of the Duty to Rescue," Law and Philosophy 19 (2000): 683-705;
33. Raziel Abelson, "A Middle View," in Raziel Abelson and Marie-Louise Friquegnon, eds., Etirics for Modern Life, 6th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003), 341-47;
34. John Arthur, "Famine Relief and the Ideal Moral Code," in Hugh LaFollette, ed., Ethics in Practice: An Anthology, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 582-90;
35. and Andrew I. Cohen, "Famine Relief and Human Virtue," in Cohen and Wellman, eds., Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics, 326-42. There are several points of overlap between some of my arguments and some of the arguments offered by these critics, but 1 develop my arguments differently and offer a different conception of the role of beneficence in a morally good life.
36. Cited in Singer, Practical Ethics, 218. Robert McNamara, who served as secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was president of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981.
37. See Peter T. Bauer on the history of harmful or wasted foreign aid, in Bauer, The Development Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 38-55.
38. In "The New Approach to Foreign Aid: Is the Enthusiasm Warranted?" Cato Foreign Policy Briefing No. 79 (September 2003), http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-079es.html (accessed March 11, 2005),
39. lan Vasquez questions many of the positive claims the World Bank makes in its book Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), www.worldbank.org/research/aid/aidpub.htm,
40. and the claims made in the essays in Roger D. Cowe, ed., A Case for Aid: Building n Consensus for Development Assistance (Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2002).
41. The World Development Report 2005, released on September 29, 2004,
42. accepts the main points long made by the World Bank's critics, namely, that the way out of poverty is private investment, not aid, either private or (especially) governmental, and that the way to invite private investment into a country is for governments to define and enforce private property rights and end corruption. See World Development Report 2005: A Better Investment Climate for Everyone (Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2004).
43. Another World Bank publication, Doing Business in 2005: Obstacles to Growth (Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2004), cites weak property rights and too many regulations creating barriers to doing business as two of the main obstacles to growth in poor countries, and argues that these barriers hurt the poor (unskilled workers, women, and the young) most of all.
44. For a criticism of aid agencies' work and many aid workers' motives, see Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (New York: Free Press, 1997);
45. interview with Maren, "A Complete Waste of Money That Succeeds Primarily at Keeping Westerners Employed," Might Magazine, March/April 1997, http:// www.netnomad.com/might.html.
46. For a mixed view, see David Rieff, "Charity on the Rampage: The Business of Foreign Aid," review of The Road to Hell, in Foreign Affairs, January/ February 1997, http://foreignaffairs.org/19970101fareviewessay3744/ david-rieff/charity-on-the-rampage;
47. and Mary Andersen, "Some Moral Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid," in Jonathan Moore, ed., Hard Choices (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998),
48. reprinted in James P. Sterba, ed., Morality in Practice, 6th ed (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001), 104-10.
49. Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," 9.
50. Singer, One World, chap. 4.
51. For an impressive attempt to assess the case for private aid, see Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence.
52. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, 62-63. And Singer makes it clear that giving away all our surplus would not be "charitable, or generous" or "supererogatory," since this implies that to do so would be to go beyond the call of duty and, therefore, not wrong not to do ("Famine," 4). His view is that we owe our surplus to the poor, and that therefore withholding it is simply wrong. I disagree with Singer on both points here: we do not "owe" what we have justly acquired to the needy, and certainly not all our "surplus"; nevertheless, withholding charity is wrong if it comes from a deficiency or lack of concern for others.
53. Feldman makes a similar point about there being other goals worth pursuing in "Comments on Living High and Letting Die,"
54. calling Unger's view fanatical. Unger rejects this characterization in his reply, but without addressing the point that there are other goals worth pursuing ("Replies," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59, no. 1 [1999]: 203-16).
55. I have defended this "objectivist" conception of happiness in my "Happiness as the Highest Good/' unpublished manuscript.
56. What I have in mind here is charity, that is, voluntary work for the poor motivated by beneficence, and not a career in poverty relief or prevention. A career in poverty relief is no more charity than, say, a career in medicine. Nor can we assume that everyone or even most people involved in aid work as a career must have a stronger-than-usual sense of beneficence. See Maren, The Road to Hell.
57. For an example of someone whose obsessive giving has been motivated by all these reasons, see the story of Zell Kravinsky as told by Ian Parker in "The Gift," The New Yorker, August 2004, 54-63.
58. Kravinsky started by giving away his millions, went on to donate a kidney, and at the time of his interview for "The Gift" had graduated to unhappily obsessing about giving his other kidney away and living on dialysis, or even giving his entire body away to be harvested for his organs. Predictably, Peter Singer has called him a "remarkable" and admirable person, while allowing that we shouldn't blame people who don't go as far as Kravinsky in their self-sacrifice (Singer, quoted in "The Gift," 63). A nondirected live donation of a kidney (the name for the kind of donation Kravinsky made) can, of course, be motivated by perfectly good reasons, such as the desire to relieve suffering or, more positively, to share with others one's good fortune and joy in living. See Marc Ian Barasch, "Extreme Altruists," Psychology Today 38, no. 2 (March/ April 2005): 78-82, for stories of live donors motivated by such reasons.
59. Someone who liked to help the needy but cared little about harming the better-off would be lacking in the concern that is the common root of both justice and beneficence. Whatever her configuration of motives, then, they could not count as beneficent on my conception of beneficence.
60. See Neera Badhwar, "The Limited Unity of Virtue," Noûs 30, no. 3 (1996): 306-29.
61. Such as, for example, the Soviet-inspired socialist policies adopted by India under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, policies that persisted despite strong evidence of their poverty-creating power.
62. A government's foreign aid or domestic welfare programs, then, cannot count as a measure of that country's-much less that government's-beneficence, politicians' claims and the popular view notwithstanding. With respect to those who do not consent to the taxation that funds one or another of these programs, the money taken from them is taken forcibly. With respect to those who do consent to the taxation, their consent may be an instance of their beneficence if they are motivated primarily by genuine good will rather than, say, guilt or fear of God, and if they have rational (even if mistaken) reasons for believing that these programs help their intended beneficiaries without unjustly harming anyone else.
63. For empirical evidence that empathy is necessary for moral agency, see Hervey Cleckley, The' Mask of Sanity (St. Louis, MO: C. V. Mosby, 1964).
64. have argued for this in "Self-Interest and Virtue," Social Philosophy and Policy 14, no. 1 (1997): 226-63,
65. and in "The Rejection of Ethical Rationalism," Logos 10 (1989): 99-131.
66. Singer, "Famine," 2;
67. Singer, Practical Ethics, 230.
68. Singer, Practical Ethics, 230.
69. See Singer, Practical Ethics, ibid.
70. and Singer, "Famine," 2. Sometimes Singer says that it is wrong not to prevent something very bad from happening if we can do so without sacrificing anything "morally significant" ("Famine," 2). This has been interpreted by some as a weaker principle than the "comparable significance" thesis. But Singer himself thinks it makes no practical difference. In his own words, if the principle "were acted upon, even in its qualified form, our lives, our society, and our world would be fundamentally changed" (2). And indeed, it is hard to see how the "morally significant" formulation will allow us to hang on to movies, art, music, etc.-anything that is not needed to satisfy our basic needs and earn a living. For these things have little moral significance compared to saving the lives of the destitute-if saving their lives is like saving a child drowning in front of our eyes.
71. Singer, Practical Ethics, 232.
72. Singer, Practical Ethics, Ibid., 223 n. 1.
73. Onora O'Neill, "Life-Boat Earth," in Charles R. Beitz, Marshall Cohen, Thomas Scanlon, and A. John Simmons, eds., A "Philosophy and Public Affairs" Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 262-81.
74. See Garrett Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence, for a useful summary of the differences usually adduced in rejecting the analogy (20-27). The term "methodological" for the second kind of objection addressed in the next sentence is also from Cullity.
75. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, 13.
76. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, Ibid., 60-61.
77. But see Frances Kamm for a dissenting view in her review of Unger's Living High and Letting Die in The Philosophical Review 108, no. 2 (April 1999): 300-305.
78. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, 75-76. The words in quotation marks are a paraphrase of what Unger says there.
79. In "Persons, Character, and Morality," reprinted in his collection, Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Bernard Williams criticizes the rule utilitarian for having "one thought too many" when he tries to give an impartial justification for saving his drowning wife over a drowning stranger: "This [rule utilitarian] construction provides the agent with one thought too many: it might have been hoped by some (for instance, by his wife) that his motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be the thought that it was his wife, not that it was his wife AND in situations like this it is permissible to save one's wife" (18, italics in the original).
80. Others who take this position are cited in note 7 above.
81. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, 60-61.
82. Cf. the works by Schmidtz and Hooker cited in note 7 above.
83. See The Chronicle of Philanthropy Update (March 10, 2005), http://philanthropy.com/ temp/email.php?id=cdg9ot6g1.sfirlqewkyu7df2aid62x1v.
84. Thanks to David Blumenfeld for suggesting this idea.
85. See "Sudden Death Becoming More Common in the Young," http:/ /heartdisease.about. com/library/news/blnws01044.htm (March 5, 2001).
86. See "Reducing Heart Failure in Infants," http://www.heartinfo. org/ms/news/8008856/ main.html (last updated June 23, 2004). There was no information about which countries, other than the United States, formed the basis of these figures.
87. The World Health Organization estimates that about 873,000 people commit suicide every year and that mental illness is a source of great suffering (http://www.who.int/ mental_health/en).
88. The act of trying to prevent someone from committing suicide cannot be criticized as paternalism if you do so on the well-founded assumption that most attempted suicides are cries for help, and that even if you are wrong about this particular one and the potential suicide truly wanted to die, he can still kill himself later.
89. See the Befrienders International website, http://www.befrienders.org/ aboutus/ about.htm.
90. See, for example, the essays in James A. Dorn, Steve H. Hanke, and Alan A. Walters, eds., The Revolution in Development Economics (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1998);
91. P. T. Bauer, Rhetoric and Reality: Studies in Economic Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986);
92. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001);
93. World Bank, Doing Business in 2005: Obstacles to Growth;
94. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights;
95. and Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
96. Singer and others who believe in massive infusions of aid, both private and governmental, sometimes talk as though properly targeted aid could end global poverty once and for all. The Millennium Challenge Account proposed by U.S. president George W. Bush in 2002 (speech at the Inter-American Development Bank, March 14, 2002, http://www. whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020314- 7.html)
97. and the call by James Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank, to double the total amount of development aid are motivated by this belief (James Wolfensohn, "A Partnership for Development and Peace," speech delivered at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington, DC, March 6, 2002).
98. Ian Vasquez points out, however, that the claims for the effectiveness of selective aid made by the World Bank are based on research that is "difficult or impossible to reproduce by outside researchers," and that "the few attempts to reproduce the Bank's findings using its own data and methodology have contravened the Bank's findings" (Vasquez, "The New Approach to Foreign Aid," http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb79.pdf).
99. Singer, "Famine", 8.
100. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, 151.
101. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, Ibid., 152-53.
102. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, Ibid., 152.
103. For example, what most of us would count as a basic necessity, namely, privacy, is regarded as less important (no doubt out of economic necessity) than many other things by many poor people in India. Thus, it is not uncommon for a poor but far from destitute family of four to live in one or two rooms that serve as bedroom, kitchen, and living room, and to use the savings to buy stylish clothes, cosmetics, a TV, a radio, arts and crafts, a scooter, and a couple of bikes. I don't know if a radio or TV counts as a basic necessity, but clearly stylish clothes and cosmetics cannot on the Singer-Unger austerity program. Yet equally clearly, they play an important role in their consumers' enjoyment of life.
104. Singer, "Famine," 7.
105. See the interview with Singer conducted by Ronald Bailey, "The Pursuit of Happiness" in reasononline, http://reason.com/0012/rb.the.shtml (December 2000).
106. Bailey comments that Singer stated that he gives 20 percent of his income for famine relief and "hinted" that he would give more if others gave more. A New York Times article reports him as saying that he gives 25 percent. See "The Singer Solution to World Poverty," The New York Times on the Web (September 5, 1999), posted on http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/singermag. html (accessed September 26, 2004).
107. Reportedly, Singer also lives in the very style he condemns by maintaining two residences: a house in Princeton and an apartment in New York City (Bailey, "The Pursuit of Happiness").
108. Of course, his family's "basic needs" might require two residences, but if so, Singer should at least acknowledge that basic needs can vary and make it permissible for others to have "a (second?) car, a larger house, [or] private schools for ... [their] children" (Singer, Practical Ethics, 232).
109. Singer, "The Bread Which You Withhold Belongs to the Hungry," 3.
110. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, 156. Unger's website can be found at http:// philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/peterunger (accessed May 8, 2005).
111. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
112. Singer, Practical Ethics, 246. In "The Bread Which You Withhold Belongs to the Hungry," Singer says, "In most communities, rich people who give, say, 10 percent of their income to help the poor are so far ahead of virtually all their equally rich counterparts that I wouldn't go out of my way to blame them for not doing more ... [even though] in some sense, they really should be doing more" (4).
113. His criticism is especially directed at the United States. Ironically, according to Giving USA 2004 (AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy, Center on Philanthropy, Indiana University, 2004), Americans voluntarily gave 2.2 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) to private philanthropy in 2003 (a staggering $241 billion), and have been giving 2 percent or more every year since 1998, after over two decades of giving somewhat less than 2 percent. Clearly, then, Americans could allocate or permit 50 percent of their total giving (1.1 percent of GDP) to go toward international aid if they saw good reason to do so, instead of the 12.2 percent (0.26 percent of GDP) they currently do (although another 10 percent is left unallocated and could, in principle, be used for international aid). The figures I cite are available at http://www.aafrc.org/press_releases/trustreleases/americansgive.html (accessed May 8, 2005).
114. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, 134.
115. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, Ibid., 162ff. For a thorough analysis of what Unger is doing in this chapter in the light of an earlier paper on contextual ethics, see Fred Feldman's review of the book in Noûs (cited in note 7 above). Feldman makes a detailed attempt to reconcile this last chapter with the rest of Unger's book, but ultimately gives up.
116. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, 160.
117. Schmidtz, "Islands in a Sea of Obligations."
118. Singer, "Singer Solution to World Poverty."
119. My point is not that there is no human feature that we would be better off without; clearly, if power-lust or blind hatred or blind obedience or cold-heartedness could be done away with, we would be much better off in terms of survival and happiness. It is not clear, however, that these features could be done away with without also doing away with capacities necessary for survival, for they may be developments-or perversions-of underlying capacities we need for survival. My complaint against Singer and Unger is that their "oughts" ignore capacities, needs, and tendencies fundamental to human survival and happiness.
120. Thanks to Clifford Orwin for pointing out this problem with Singer's and Unger's disregard of the facts of human nature. In the last section of his act-consequentialist defense of the Singer Principle in "Moral Limits?" (cited in note 7 above), Arneson also assumes that we can ignore human nature in constructing our standards of right and wrong-although we must take it into account in praising or blaming people, as it would be "priggish" to think that, given human nature, it is a "great sin" to fail to live by the Singer ideal. Arneson does not explain why it is not priggish-or irrational-to not take human nature into account in constructing our standards of right and wrong.
121. peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000),
122. cited in Bailey, "The Pursuit of Happiness" (reasononline interview).
123. Singer, quoted in Bailey, "The Pursuit of Happiness." 6" The Pursuit of Happiness Ibid.
124. The not-for-profit Institute of Justice in Washington, DC, defends victims of eminent domain abuse as well as victims of regulations that benefit established businesses at the expense of new entrants or would-be entrants into the field.
125. In the absence of these conditions, no amount of humanitarian or development aid can do much good and, indeed, has often done much harm. See, in particular, World Development Report 2005 and other sources cited in note 9 above.
126. The organizations I have in mind include the Cato Institute, which has held several conferences on limited government, free trade, and the rule of law in China; the Institute for Humane Studies, which offers scholarships and educational seminars in ideas of liberty and the rule of law for students; and Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which provides seed money and technical and intellectual assistance for setting up think-tanks devoted to spreading these ideas in countries from India to Kenya.
127. SpaceShipOne, the first privately-funded manned spacecraft to reach space, was the winner of the Ansari X-prize in 2004 for twice reaching an altitude of more than 1.00 kilometers within a week. Burt Rutan's dream is to make space-tourism possible by finding cheaper ways of launching into space. Much of the funding comes from billionaire Paul Allen, the former Microsoft cofounder.
128. This neo-Lockean proviso is derived from John Locke's non-waste condition on the acquisition of property: Locke argues that it is wrong to acquire more than one can use before it is destroyed. See John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1698),
129. in Two Treatises of Government, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap. 5, para. 33.
130. Of course, wasting or hoarding instead of giving are not the only expressions of a lack of due regard for others. Another is systematically failing to notice occasions for beneficence. It is probably impossible to give a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for lacking beneficence, but it is safe to say that someone who spends money easily for his own pleasures but almost never for beneficent causes is lacking in beneficence.
131. In "Islands in a Sea of Obligations," Schmidtz imagines the disastrous effects for Western economies if we started following the Singer-Unger thesis; I imagine these effects for the global market and the global poor.
132. Many stylish, expensive clothes are manufactured in China or India and, thanks to a 1995 World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement to strike down trade barriers, from 2005 on such clothes are expected to come largely from these two countries. For information on the WTO agreement, see http://www.wto.org/english/ tratop_e/texti_e/texintro_e.htm (accessed May 8, 2005).
133. Unger, Living High and Letting Die, 134.
134. Singer, "Famine," 7.
135. Singer, "Singer Solution to World Poverty."