•II•
•4•
Security, subsistence, social participation, and physical movement are almost certainly not the only basic rights. The right to due process, or to a fair trial, for example, could surely be established by an argument closely resembling the argument in chapter 3 for the two liberties discussed there. But in the North Atlantic intellectual community few people would seriously challenge the importance of due process, liberty, or security, although many have challenged and do challenge the importance of subsistence rights. Therefore, as I mentioned in the introduction, I would like to concentrate in this part of the book on some of the main arguments ordinarily presented against subsistence rights, letting the positive case rest for now. In chapters 4, 5, and 6, then, I will be considering respectively the following serious and widespread contentions:
Chapter 4: The practical consequences of everyone’s enjoying adequate nutrition—and especially the allegedly resultant global “population explosion”—would make the fulfillment of subsistence rights impracticable, however genuine the rights may be at a theoretical level. It would hurt the future poor.
Chapter 5: The fulfillment of subsistence rights would probably place inordinate, if not unlimited, burdens on everyone except the poorest. It would hurt me.
Chapter 6: It cannot be anyone’s responsibility to fulfill the rights of strangers on the other side of the globe, however much responsibility one may have to the deprived within one’s own country. It would hurt the local poor.
We turned for a brief look at basic rights to two liberties in order to establish that the acknowledgement of subsistence rights, far from committing us to some obscure “trade-off” of all liberty for subsistence, is deeply intertwined with the acknowledgement of rights to some important liberties, including effective social participation and physical movement. Now we return to our primary focus on basic rights to subsistence and consider the potentially crippling view that while people may in some sense or other “have” rights to subsistence, the actual provision of social guarantees for subsistence would be, in a word, impractical. This is a view that withdraws in practice what it seems to grant in theory.1 So, let us consider some practical matters—and their theoretical presuppositions, beginning with the the general worry that the better nutrition that is a central part of subsistence would lead to larger populations that would then have worse nutrition.
A realistic look at human rights needs to consider problems about population growth, then, for at least two different reasons. First, when subsistence rights in particular are discussed, some people do in fact become concerned that “natural” constraints on “excess” population are being removed without sufficient attention to the probable consequences. Depending on exactly what form it takes, this concern is not entirely inappropriate, although it can, as I will try to show, be satisfied. Second, in an approach to human rights like the present one that is committed to examining the ramifications of people’s actually having their rights protected and in fact using them, instead of merely discussing the “rights themselves” (whatever exactly that could really mean) in the abstract, a consideration of both the effects of population growth on ability to enjoy various rights and the effects of the enjoyment of the rights on population growth, which may then in turn affect people’s ability to enjoy the same or other rights, is not optional or peripheral but critical and central to the overall plausibility of the view. Consequences are not all that matters morally, but they do matter very much.
One of a number of reasons that traditional theories of rights lost credibility and are inadequate intellectual support for the series of declarations and covenants on rights since World War II is, I suspect, the rather ethereal quality of their handling of many questions. Perhaps the confidence that rights were based upon natural laws that, it was assumed, were guaranteed to fit together rationally and coherently gave theorists the impression that they were relieved of any intellectual responsibility to assess thoroughly the consequences of, and the preconditions for, the general exercise of the rights hopefully declared to be universal. I, in any case, must consider the implications of everyone’s exercising whatever rights he or she has, not the implications of his or her merely “having” them in some form in which they cannot be enjoyed. Consequently, it would be damaging to the position I have presented if it could be established that the enjoyment by all—or more—people of at least subsistence levels of necessities would produce too many people for any—or many—rights to be actually enjoyed by any—or many—of the people then alive.2
Those who advance these population objections, as I will call them, to the fulfillment of subsistence rights are in effect advancing or, more typically, assuming a third kind of thesis about the explanation of deprivation, in addition to the accidental deprivation and the essential deprivation whose characteristics I noted in chapter 2. The population objections rest upon a thesis about inevitable deprivation: deprivation that is inevitable unless population growth is slowed by means of the intentional refusal to fulfill subsistence rights. If indeed the world now has, or soon will have, an absolute shortage of vital resources—“too little food for too many people”—then some (other) people will simply have to do without the necessities for survival.3 On this thesis about the explanation of deprivation, the unavoidable deprivations resulting from the supposed excess of people are taken to be as purely natural as any social phenomenon could be, and attempting to provide social guarantees against the resultant starvation is made to look quixotic.4 “‘Ought’ presupposes ‘can,’” and since we cannot prevent deprivation of subsistence, it cannot be that we ought to try. If this hypothesis were correct, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights would indeed be more like a child’s letter to Santa Claus than the multilateral treaty in force that it is. It would not even be possible to avoid deprivation, except perhaps by fasting.
Someone who felt compelled to object to the universal protection and enjoyment of subsistence rights, for fear that excessive growth of population would be significantly encouraged, might attempt to draw any one of several specific conclusions. For example, the objector might try to establish that there simply are no rights to subsistence. This conclusion, however, is extremely strong and would need a correspondingly powerful set of supporting reasons, especially in the face of the case that has already been built in favor of recognizing subsistence rights and fulfilling the correlative subsistence duties.
A less extreme conclusion, which would nevertheless seriously threaten the view that there are subsistence rights and that they ought routinely to be honored, is that there may indeed be subsistence rights—they are not denied, anyhow—but subsistence rights (a) may, like other rights, sometimes be overridden and (b) ought to be overridden when the consequences of fulfilling them would probably include pressure toward excessive population. In short, subsistence rights are not absolute, and one of the grounds for insisting upon the qualification of their fulfillment is, according to the challenge, the high probability of a consequent significant contribution to overpopulation. It is this more plausible challenge that I will try to counter.5
I have already conceded elsewhere that no right, not even the right not to be tortured, is absolute in the sense that one cannot even conceive imaginary situations in which violation of the right would, given the alternatives, be the least evil course.6 I have also stressed, however, that no conclusions whatsoever follow from imaginary situations, for any actual cases that are significantly different from the extraordinary cases imagined. Artificial cases make bad ethics—and even worse applied ethics. Nevertheless, in principle it is always possible to attempt to offer an adequate justification for overriding even what one fully believes to be a basic human right. Consequently, an attempt to justify the contention that subsistence rights can be overridden, when honoring them would contribute to excessive population, is perfectly in order, even for someone who grants that in happier circumstances these rights ought to be defended and enjoyed. And this particular objection is especially disturbing because, if correct, it means that attempts to fulfill subsistence rights sometimes are, in a certain sense, self-defeating. But is the objection correct? Before we can examine it, one other aspect of the objection’s meaning needs to be made more precise.
The difficulty alleged against any attempt to fulfill everyone’s subsistence rights could be either that the attempt is rather literally self-defeating or that it is self-defeating in a broader sense. The narrower charge would be that the very fulfillment of subsistence rights today would help to frustrate any hope of fulfilling subsistence rights later: that preventing some deaths from deprivation now is to cause more deaths from deprivation later. Children whose lives are saved today will become the parents and grandparents of even more children who will place even greater strains on the limited resources available on this planet to support human life. The rights frustrated in the future, according to this narrower version of the population objection, would be subsistence rights.
The broader charge would be that the future enjoyment of some rights, but not necessarily subsistence rights, will be frustrated by the protection now of everyone’s subsistence rights. A typical recent alarmist article concludes: “In sum, the problems of food shortages by the turn of the century will ramify from the countries directly concerned. The impact on a weakened American economy could be enormous. Americans are not going to starve, but the average American living in the year 2000 faces, as compared with today, rampant inflation in food and energy prices; a greater chance for unemployment; and either higher taxes to meet the cost in social programs for the elderly or the curtailment of those programs.” Earlier the writer has predicted: “A poorer, if still well-to-do America, will stand within a world of Hobbesian starkness.” What is in question is not the particular predictions about 2000—there is “rampant inflation in food and energy prices” in 1979—but the attempt to lay all this at the feet of “this horde of idle, hungry people”: “The reasons are not necessarily a reduction in food supplies, but, more importantly, vast increases in world population.”7 All this is presumably to happen even without any efforts to fulfill subsistence rights.
Current protection of everyone’s subsistence rights would still, on the broader interpretation of the population objection, have a self-defeating character from the point of view of the general fulfillment of rights, since the protection of some rights for some people (them) would be preventing the fulfillment of the same or different rights for related or unrelated people (us). The general idea, for example, is that given limited resources, or even only a ceiling on the rate of technological advance, increases in population will at some point force reductions in the quality of life. Roughly—very roughly—speaking, quality will vary inversely with quantity, the critic assumes. To the extent that “quality of life” involves matters of rights, which is a question the objector needs to settle, the enjoyment of rights is expected to start declining at some point with increases in numbers of people. But the fact that the rights might be different and more, or less, basic introduces major additional complexities of a morally significant type into the broader objection. So the broad and the narrow versions of the objection need some separate consideration.8
Unfortunately, these population objections raise in an interconnected way two of the most challenging problems of political philosophy: how to allocate scarce resources across time and how to allocate scarce resources across space. These are normally referred to respectively as justice among generations and justice among nations, or international justice. But these labels carry a great deal of baggage, much of it of dubious value. In particular, they assume that it is not only intellectually useful but also morally appropriate to structure the entire discussion in terms of generational and national boundaries. This tends to shift the burden of argument onto anyone who wants to use any categories other than these traditional ones. The significance of such boundaries is, however, one of the central issues, and even if the significance will be reaffirmed in the end, it ought not merely to be built into the terms of the discussion in the beginning.9 So one might, then, refer to these two clusters of issues more vaguely but more neutrally as temporal allocation and spatial allocation.
No major theory of justice, including A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, has carried the discussion of either temporal allocation or spatial allocation very far.10 Distributive principles are normally formulated by philosophers for a single community spatially and temporally, and it is sometimes rather optimistically assumed that principles to constrain transfers among different communities, however the boundaries in time and space are to be drawn, are derivable in some straightforward manner from principles governing the distribution within a single community. But it is usually also assumed that community boundaries are morally significant to some unspecified extent, with the result that it is quite obscure how inter-community (transgenerational, transnational, or both) principles are supposed to be related to intracommunity principles.
I will not remedy the lack of a truly general theory of justice. Yet the population objection quite legitimately insists that any claims about the existence of universal rights, including subsistence rights, be evaluated from global and long-term viewpoints. So we must build what we can from an intellectual heritage that has until recently largely focused on transfers within one nation during one period.
STARVATION AS A METHOD OF POPULATION CONTROL
The first serious question for the narrow version of the population objection, however, is whether its implied cure would be acceptable, even if its diagnosis were correct. Let us suppose for now that it is reliably predictable that if the subsistence rights of everyone alive today are protected as rapidly and fully as possible, future generations of humanity will be significantly larger than if we act less decisively to protect subsistence rights or even quite consciously refrain from protecting them for at least some significant numbers of people.11 We are talking about choosing not to prevent some preventable deaths from deprivation. We are entertaining the strategy, for example, of intentionally allowing some malnutrition and starvation that we can prevent if we choose. To be more specific—and it is essential to realistic discussion to spell out concretely the implications of our abstractions, however useful the abstractions themselves remain for some stages of discussion—we are entertaining the strategy of purposely allowing considerable numbers of children to die. Even now, half the children who die in the poorer countries die because of malnutrition.12 In Guinea, as of 1970, for example, 36% of all children were dying (of all causes) before the age of 5 (Egypt, 25%; Guatemala, 18%).13 We are asking, again, Ivan Karamazov’s question of his brother Alyosha:
Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that child beating its breast with its fist, for instance—in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.14
It is small exaggeration to compare death by deprivation to death by torture. Starvation is a prolonged agony, usually shortened, if at all, only by diseases that bring their own discomforts. And Ivan’s defiance was for the sake of a single child. We are contemplating deaths of a magnitude sufficient to make measurable changes in population trends.
The full horror of what is in effect a proposal to include the preventable starvation of children as a major component of a method of population control ought to be kept in focus. Those who, on the basis of population effects, object to assigning high priority to protecting subsistence rights do not say, and perhaps do not understand, that this is the policy that follows from their words. When Maurice Cranston, for example, mocks the advocates of any economic rights, repeatedly and misleadingly suggesting that holidays with pay is an example typical of all economic rights and resigning himself, without examining any alternatives, to India’s managing as best she can entirely on the resources left behind by the British, the implication is that it is only practical and sensible to permit starvation to function, in India, as one major means of population control.15 Cranston obscures, or does not see, the terrible severity of his view’s implications. The fact, if it be a fact, that resulting starvation within India would be only intentionally allowed, to occur, and not intentionally initiated, is of little consequence. If preventable starvation occurs as an effect of a decision not to prevent it, the starvation is caused by, among other things, the decision not to prevent it. Passive infanticide is still infanticide.
Part of the underlying logic of Cranston’s position seems to be that one ought not to acknowledge any rights that fail the “test of practicability,” where practicability is interpreted to be incompatible with transfers of “capital wealth.”16 The reductio ad absurdum of this line of reasoning occurred during the British rule of India. The British had procedures to be followed in the case of a famine, but although approximately three million persons died of starvation and starvation-induced disease in the region of Calcutta during 1943, no famine was ever declared. The explanation of the Governor of Bengal to the Viceroy was: “The Famine Code has not been applied as we simply have not the food to give the prescribed ration.”17 In other words, if you cannot perform your duty, try to obscure what is happening. “Realism” becomes denial of reality.
On the other hand, the terrible nature of the policy implied by any objection based on population effects to fulfilling subsistence rights, ought not to be thought by an advocate of protecting subsistence rights to settle the issue by itself. For, if the population objection were correct, the consequences of protecting everyone’s subsistence rights will be even more terrible still. The starvation toll would simply have been pushed into the future—and encouraged to expand. Indeed, it would simply be cowardly or self-indulgent to embrace the policy that defers the dying children into the future and multiplies their numbers, merely through an inability to face up to implementing the objector’s alternative, if the objector were correct. And the uncertainty of the future, since it affects both strategies equally, is neutral between them. It is, unfortunately, not clearly more rational to reject a horror in the present, even if it is certain, and accept instead a consequent probable horror of much greater magnitude in the future, if the probability of the future horror cannot be estimated.
Thomas Nagel has given the following rather complex argument, including an appeal to uncertainty but also including an essential factual assumption:
We are . . . weighing the certainty of a present disaster against the possibility of a greater future disaster—a possibility to which no definite likelihood can be assigned. . . . Since the catastrophic results predicted by Hardin are not inevitable, and can be combated directly, it would be wrong to refuse to avert certain disaster in the present on the assumption that this was the only way to prevent greater and equally certain disaster in the future. Sometimes a present sacrifice must be made to forestall even the uncertain prospect of a far greater evil in the future. But this is true only if the two evils are of different orders of magnitude. In the case at hand, the present sacrifice is too great to be subject to such calculations.18
But “it would be wrong to refuse to avert certain disaster in the present on the assumption that this was the only way to prevent greater and equally certain disaster in the future” only if this is in fact not the only way to prevent disaster in the future. Nagel is correct, I believe, that famine now is not the only way to prevent famine later and that the later problems can be combated directly, for the reasons I will next try to indicate. It is important, however, not to think that one can ignore this question of fact and argue a priori that the certainty of a present disaster should always be given more weight than the possibility of a greater future disaster. Nagel’s premise about uncertainty cannot carry the weight of his conclusion without the vital (and correct) factual assumption. For if it turns out that the greater future disaster does indeed occur, and only because we chose not to allow the smaller present disaster, then we will by our unwise choice have brought about the far greater of the two evils. And insofar as the possible future disaster is uncertain, it will presumably also be uncertain whether it is or is not of a different order of magnitude. Consequently, we cannot avoid considering whether in fact deprivation now is the only way to avoid greater deprivation later.19
But fortunately we may not need to choose the lesser of two horrors, as both the population objections imply we must. In fact, we have a choice that is an alternative to both ignoring rights as a means to controlling population and protecting subsistence rights while ignoring population growth, but the correlative duties are substantial. As soon as one appreciates that starvation is by no means the only—and hardly the most humane—effective form of population control, one realizes that, however urgent the danger of overpopulation, concern with overpopulation is by itself no reason at all to deny subsistence rights. The dilemma suggested by the population objections dissolves entirely, provided that in fact poor countries have, or can obtain, means of controlling population growth that are compatible with the protection of subsistence rights. But can they? Or does the world face inevitable deprivation?
INEVITABLE DEPRIVATION?
A full discussion of this issue would go considerably beyond the scope of this book and the competence of its author. Some basic points, however, are well-established. The most humane methods of controlling population growth involve decreasing the birth rate, not increasing the death rate for children already born. Overpopulation is normally one part of a vicious circle also composed of poverty and malnutrition.20 Many of the reasons poor people have for producing large numbers of children are direct reflections of the apparent hopelessness of their economic situation.21 Much evidence suggests that after living standards have improved enough to bring about sustained and readily perceptible reductions in infant mortality, people become considerably more receptive to the adoption of birth control measures because some of the reasons for having more children that were associated with poverty no longer apply. Whether or not improvements in living standards that reduce infant mortality are sufficient to make people more willing to control births, such improvements may be necessary, and they are undeniably extremely helpful. No nation in history is definitely known to have stabilized its birth rate for an extended period before the vast majority of its population had a minimally decent standard of living, and we have inadequate reasons for confidence that the usual historical order can often be reversed.22
Improvements in living standards are not, it should be emphasized, being put forward here as a substitute for direct measures of birth control, but as an extremely valuable, if not indispensable, contributing factor. The best hopes of controlling population through discouraging births, instead of encouraging deaths by refraining from protecting subsistence, depend on simultaneous, if not prior, improvements in living standards. The protection of subsistence rights, therefore, may be part of the solution, not part of the problem, as presupposed by the population objection.
If it is not entirely certain that even the combination of significant improvements in living standards and vigorous programs of birth control can slow population growth before it is too late, it is far less likely that birth control projects alone can do the job. Any cheap strategy that relied on the single factor of birth control, without the improvements in living conditions that have normally accompanied or preceded the attainment of stable or near stable growth, would recklessly court the “bigger famine later” of the narrow population objection. The only responsible alternative to starvation as a method of population control, then, is a package of measures to reduce birth rates and improve living conditions.
It is, then, reasonable to assume what can be strongly supported with factual evidence: that improvements in living standards up to at least subsistence levels are powerfully supportive complements to, if not literally necessary conditions for, effective programs of population control through reduction in birth rates. However, in presenting even a little of the case for thinking that measures to maintain subsistence are complementary to the only effective measures to control population growth that are also civilized, I have briefly taken up a burden of proof that the structure of the argument does not require me to shoulder, but places upon anyone who presses the narrow population objection. This is a fundamental feature of the overall structure of the argument, and it is worthwhile to emphasize it.
Prior to this chapter, we have seen that a number of considerations converge in support of the conclusion that everyone has a basic right to subsistence. Taken all together, these considerations establish at the very least a strong presumption in favor of subsistence rights. The population objections are introduced in an attempt to defeat the presumption in favor of subsistence rights. With a strong case already made in favor of subsistence rights, it is up to anyone who wishes to challenge subsistence rights on the basis of either population objection to show what needs to be shown in order to establish that the population objection deserves to be given the significance the challenger assigns it. For this purpose it is immaterial whether the challenge to subsistence rights is in the form of a complete denial that people have such rights or in the form of a reason for overriding the fulfillment of a right acknowledged to deserve respect in better circumstances.
The burden is upon the opponent of acknowledging or fulfilling subsistence rights, who advances the narrower objection, to demonstrate (1) that population growth will be intolerable without resort to population control by means of starvation and (2) that population growth would be made tolerable as a consequence of a resort to starvation as a method of population control. He or she must show, in other words, that no less horrible method would be effective—that it is the only way—and that the attempt to reduce the population growth rate by means of failures to honor people’s subsistence claims would be effective. I believe that the weight of the evidence already cited indicates that both of the theses needed to support the challenge are false, but the structure of the argument actually requires the challenger to try to show that they are true.
The practical problem is that any package of measures seriously intended to break the syndrome of overpopulation, malnutrition, and poverty would involve large investments. Probably no one would claim to know exactly how much it would cost to enable everyone to live at no worse than subsistence levels.23 Nevertheless, two facts are undeniable: (1) many of the poorer countries do not control, and have no foreseeable prospect of independently coming to control, the wealth necessary to make the investments that would permit the poorest of their people to enjoy adequate diets, potable water, and the other elements that may be claimed as subsistence rights; and (2) the only feasible source of the amounts now needed in addition to internal redistributions are transfers from the countries that are now wealthy: the OECD countries, some of the OPEC countries, and some of the COMECON countries.24
This is an issue on which what initially appears to be a sensible moderate position actually rests on sand and collapses when pressed. One can responsibly acknowledge subsistence rights, including duties to aid, only if one is willing to support, where necessary, substantial transfers of wealth or resources to those who cannot provide for their own subsistence and willing to support any structural changes necessary nationally and internationally to make those transfers possible.25 Garrett Hardin and his followers are mistaken on many points—most, I would say—but they are correct on one point: doing too little is probably worse than doing nothing.26 Doing too little is certainly worse than doing nothing if its effect is to exchange a smaller famine now for a larger famine later. But if, as seems evident, the dilemma can be shattered by the adequate fulfillment of duties to aid those deprived of subsistence, no such apocalyptic choice is required. Economically trivial acts of charity, however, will not enable the standard of living in areas where subsistence rights are threatened to be raised to the point at which it becomes, and can be seen by the poor themselves to be, reasonable to have fewer children. Transfers adequate actually to enable the deprived to provide for their own subsistence may need to be of a magnitude sufficient to take the edge off the affluence of the standard of living of those from whom they come. This raises in the sharpest possible form what was earlier called the broader form of the population objection.
IT’S NOT THE PRINCIPLE OF THE THING, IT’S THE MONEY27
This broader objection to fulfilling—sometimes even to acknowledging—subsistence rights is based not upon a supposed clash between the subsistence rights of some people (this generation) and the subsistence rights of other people (a later generation), but upon a supposed clash between the subsistence rights of some people (the deprived) and the preferences or non-basic rights of the other people who are best able to aid the deprived.28 The general idea behind the broader population objection is that there are (or will be, if aid is increased or, perhaps, only continued) so many deprived persons that the cost of aiding them all until they can be self-sufficient is somehow an unfair, if not impossible, burden to impose upon the affluent. In fact, most fears of any impoverishment of the affluent are laughable nonsense, for many kinds of reasons.
One kind of reason is limits upon the absorptive capacity of recipient nations and individuals. Even if the sources of aid were willing and able to make unlimited transfers, the rate at which transfers can be made would cap the maximum possible transfers at a relatively low level. For instance, if transfers of some commodity like food are what is in question, port capacities for the unloading of ships set a sharp limit on imports of the commodity. Even so wealthy a nation as the U.S.S.R. is often forced to import less grain than it would like because of limited port capacity.29 One could, of course, consider building new ports, but that would take years and the maximum speed of port construction limits the speed at which the import limit can be changed. Alternatively, one could consider airlifts by plane and then by helicopter in cases of imminent disaster, but besides limits set by the availability of pilots and aircraft, one would still face limits on storage capacity at the end of the line to keep the grain safe from spoilage, rats, etc. And so on.
If, as is normally better, the transfers are not in kind but are of funds, the absorptive capacity of the recipient economy sets stringent limits on how much can be admitted without distortions, extreme inflation, virtually irresistible temptations to corruption, etc. The need mutually to adjust and coordinate changes in supplies of money, jobs, and the commodities apt to be wanted by those who enjoy new jobs or additional spendable income will, no matter how exactly the coordination is brought about, require time and set a limit on the speed at which even revolutionary change can occur without the chaos in which people are deprived of their basic rights.
In addition to ineradicable physical and economic limits on absorptive capacity, attempts to aid the deprived face potentially changeable but currently very real political obstacles in the form of governing elites who are indifferent or hostile to the fulfillment of the basic rights of their own citizens and who are themselves powerful members of the reluctant affluent whose objections to subsistence rights we are now considering. In many cases these elites are exploitative dictatorships with no moral right to the power they wield or the advantages they enjoy, and their opposition to efforts to fulfill subsistence rights should be defeated whenever possible. Nevertheless, insofar as the question is whether the transfers that can actually be made are so enormous that those with the duties to make them will be impoverished by the loss of the amounts involved, it is only realistic to include in the calculations the fact that, for political reasons, many transfers that ought to be made cannot in fact be made.
That it is the size of the actual transfers that are in fact likely to be made that is relevant is a result of the form of the broader objection. The objection is not that it would somehow in principle be wrong to require any transfers, but that in practice transfers of the magnitude feared to be likely by the objector would, by some standard remaining to be specified, be too large in quantity to be reasonable to require. In other words, the challenge does not deny that people have rights to subsistence at all, but maintains that in the circumstances we actually face, the rights are overridden by the burdensome expense of fulfilling them as completely as possible. Accordingly, all constraints that would in fact function to limit the size of the possible transfers are directly relevant to the question of whether the quantities likely to be involved are unreasonable.
The physical constraints, economic constraints, and political constraints mentioned so far are all limits upon the size and rate of the transfers that could be made even if the transfers needed were enormous. The most significant factors of all, however, are brakes upon the size of the transfers that are needed. It is, of course, not possible to assign a precise price tag to the fulfillment of subsistence rights throughout the world, and consequently it is difficult to judge the implications of studies of, for example, changes in per capita income for judgments about the fulfillment of subsistence rights. Nevertheless, provided that the governments of developing countries were committed to internal policies, including policies toward income distribution, that gave priority to basic rights including subsistence, one can reasonably assume that nations with a gross domestic product per capita of US$400 (in 1970 prices) could manage the fulfillment of subsistence rights. Wassily Leontief and his associates have recently directed a study for the United Nations that considered the feasibility from most major viewpoints, including that of environmental damage, of reducing the inequality in income (measured in average gross domestic product per capita) between the developed countries and the developing countries from the 12:1 ratio of 1970 to a 7:1 ratio in 2000.30 An inequality between rich and poor nations of 7:1 would, needless to say, still be extreme, but the changes that would reduce the inequality from 12:1 to 7:1 could be used to raise the average gross domestic product of even the poorest developing countries—“non-oil Asia and Africa”—to US$400 (in 1970 prices). Accomplishing this would involve raising growth rates of domestic products to 6.9 in developing countries, restraining growth rates of developed countries to 3.6, and restraining population growth rates in developing countries to 2.0.31
None of this would, of course, be easy, but it is perfectly possible physically and economically. The problems, according to Leontief’s UN study, are political—and therefore, I would suggest, partly moral:
The principal limits to sustained economic growth and accelerated development are political, social and institutional in character rather than physical. No insurmountable physical barriers exist within the twentieth century to the accelerated development of the developing regions;
The most pressing problem of feeding the rapidly increasing population of the developing regions can be solved by bringing under cultivation large areas of currently unexploited arable land and by doubling and trebling land productivity [in the developing countries]. Both tasks are technically feasible but are contingent on drastic measures of public policy favourable to such development and on social and institutional changes in the developing countries.32
Leontief’s calculations strongly support the thesis of my argument: although it is essential that the affluent fulfill their duties to the poor, the most the affluent could do, even if they did the maximum possible, would fall far short of impoverishing them.33
After all, the Leontief study projects growth for the already developed countries at a rate of 3.6% per year, leaving them in the year 2000 still 7 times better off than the by then considerably better off developing countries. Obviously improvements for the poorest countries depend upon not only avoiding disaster in the developed countries but maintaining minimal economic health in those globe-dominating nations. The developing countries need some markets and sources, however high the degree of self-reliance that is ideal. Even if one believes that inequalities of 7:1 cannot be indefinitely justified—and ought never to have been allowed to build up in the first place—one could not assist the developing regions by “closing down” the developed regions, if one wanted to:
Investment resources coming from abroad would be important but are secondary as compared to the internal sources. . . .
To ensure accelerated development two general conditions are necessary: first, far-reaching internal changes of a social, political and institutional character in the developing countries, and second, significant changes in the world economic order. Accelerated development leading to a substantial reduction of the income gap between the developing and the developed countries can only be achieved through a combination of both these conditions. Clearly, each of them taken separately is insufficient, but when developed hand in hand, they will be able to produce the desired outcome, (emphasis added)34
The results of this UN study by Leontief contain for the affluent of the developed countries much good news and little bad news. The bad news is that some transfers of wealth from the affluent of the developed regions to the poor of the developing regions are essential—a “necessary” condition—but the good news is that even this redistribution takes the form of unequal growth rates, not decline for one side and growth for the other. All that is needed, or possible, is the redistribution consisting of unequal rates of growth. The absolute amount of growth, on the UN scenario, for the developed nations would be far greater than the growth of the developing nations, of course, because the developed start from a 12:1 advantage and thus an enormously greater base. This can hardly be considered, on the whole, a very great demand. The affluent are expected not to enjoy less, but only to acquire more at a somewhat slower rate than they would if they maximized their own interests, as narrowly construed. From a moral point of view, such a demand in the fulfillment of basic rights is mild indeed, and the demand should be kept so low, as I will argue in chapter 5, only if in fact faster or larger transfers are not possible economically.
Indeed, the nearest thing to a significant sacrifice to fall upon the affluent of the developed countries would be not directly economic, but political. The foreign policies of the governments of the developed countries would need to stop subsidizing the governments of developing countries that refused to take the “drastic measures of public policy favourable to such development.” Many such regimes are maintained by vital support from the governments of developed countries, precisely because the economic policies of these developing country regimes are tilted much further toward the welfare of developed countries, as opposed to the welfare of the poor majority in their own countries, than their own subjects would want, if their rights to participation were honored, and much too far to provide for the fulfillment of their own subjects’ rights to subsistence. We will return in chapter 7 to such implications for foreign policy, which are actually not duties to aid at all but mere duties to avoid complicity in the deprivation practiced by these repressive dictatorships, including the enforcers of the essential deprivations explained in chapter 2.
The empirical basis for the broader population objection, then, looks as dubious as the empirical basis for the narrower population objection. What is worse for both versions of the objection, however, is that rather than being expressions of some kind of straightforward realism, they are themselves disguised moral positions—and question-begging ones at that. Any form of the population objection must assume that the existing distribution of wealth and income among nations is morally beyond challenge. It assumes this when it takes for granted that a nation is overpopulated if it is having difficulty supporting its present population on its present wealth and income. But it is possible that instead of having too many people for its wealth, it has too little wealth for its people. This depends upon how much wealth its people ought to have, and this, in turn, depends in part upon how much they have a right to. That is what the argument is all about. To attempt to settle the argument by merely declaring certain countries to be overpopulated is in effect to declare some of their people to be “excess”—extra people with no business to be there. And this is to smuggle in a judgment about justice disguised as a fact about demography.35 To see the strength of the implicit and unargued moral assumption, one need only ask: why is it they who have no right to be there (consuming scarce food, energy, etc.) and not I who have no right to be here (consuming scarce food, energy, etc.—at much higher rates)? Could it be that we have the same basic rights? I have tried in the first part of this book to give some good reasons for thinking so. The population objections simply assume the contradictory position without giving any good reasons.