Jos Philips

Jos Philips, ‘Poverty: Some Key Conceptual Choices, and Its Link with Justice and Human Rights,’ in W.M. Speelman et al. (Eds.), Poverty as Problem and as Path, Münster: Aschendorff, 2017, p. 71–82.

1. Introduction

This article aims to defend a certain conceptual understanding of poverty. To put my cards on the table right away: the most important features of that understanding will be that poverty is regarded as material; as related to a lack of real freedoms; as involuntary; as multidimensional; as objective; and as in important respects absolute, yet time-relative. Of course, all of this needs to be explained and argued for, and that is what this article will be about. In doing so it will not, I should say immediately, be providing a complete definition of poverty, nor a conceptual map for understanding poverty in each and every context. But I do hope to show that conceptual choices matter: it is not insignificant how we choose to conceive of poverty. Conceptual choices may be such that they can be very helpful or, to the contrary, can have very unfortunate implications. One, not insignificant, implication of conceptions of poverty, and one that I will pursue in particular in the present article, is that they are connected to certain ways of thinking of the connection between poverty on the one hand and injustice and human rights violations on the other; and this connection may turn out in a more or less fortunate way.

The conception of poverty that I will end up with (and whose main features were already briefly indicated above) is not, to my mind, shockingly novel. On the other hand, it is not, in the relevant literature, very often explicitly defended with all these features.[1] The literature which I am thinking of is to be found in different disciplines: philosophy, economics, theology, sociology, etc. Philosophy is my own discipline. But that does not mean that all the concepts and arguments used in this article exclusively, or even primarily, belong to philosophy. For example, some may be as prevalent, or find their origin, in economics or the other social sciences.

The article will be structured as follows. First (in the remainder of this introduction) I will make some methodological remarks on how to go about doing conceptual analysis. Then, in Section 2, I will outline and defend three key conceptual choices with regard to poverty. Section 3 will consider the resulting links between poverty on the one hand and justice and human rights on the other. Section 4 concludes.

Conceptual analysis: methodological remarks

If we ask what poverty is, we already have some idea of what it is (cf. Rawls 1971, p.5); otherwise we would not understand the question. A further conceptual explication of poverty had, then, better hold on to some of this initial understanding – roughly, the understanding of poverty in common usage. Otherwise we end up ‘changing the subject’.[2] However, that does not mean, I take it, that an analysis of poverty must try to capture as much as possible of common usage. It may be quite revisionist: common usage is often confused and contradictory, and a conception of poverty which aspires to be useful for any roles must to a certain extent ‘tidy’ it up. How this is best done will depend on the specific roles one has in mind; and if one has no roles in mind at all, one may be ‘too free to make progress’ (Dworkin 1988, p. 7). For example, if the concept is to be fit for policy purposes, its level of concreteness, its not being too liable to abuse, and its adequately expressing the disvalue of poverty, will, among other things, have to be points of attention. For scientific purposes, a relation with how poverty is conceptualised in the relevant academic literature, and that the conceptual choices allow for diachronic constancy in measuring poverty, may be important. However, the work in this article will be preliminary: a number of conceptual choices with regard to poverty will be defended whose implications will be defensible for a number of roles (policy-related, roles in getting greater clarity about poverty in social debates, certain roles in scientific enquiry) without already precisely specifying for which roles, and without claiming that these conceptual choices would be best for each and every role.

2. Poverty: Three conceptual choices

I will now defend three important conceptual choices with regard to poverty. Poverty should be understood, I will argue, as material not spiritual; as having to do, above all, with a lack of ‘real freedoms’; and as absolute, in a sense to be explained, yet in an important sense time-relative.

Poverty: material not spiritual

The dominant way of understanding poverty may be to understand it as material poverty, where it is associated with a lack of goods (property) or money (income or wealth).

By contrast, the expression ‘spiritual poverty’ is used to point both to very negative things such as character flaws (‘he’s a spiritually poor guy’) and to very positive things (‘an ideal of spiritual poverty’). Not only, then, does this expression cover a very wide range of meanings, something which could be remedied by being revisionist towards ordinary usage. But it also points to phenomena which have many and important differences with material poverty as described above. If it is character flaws that one is talking about, these may or may not be found with those who are materially poor (one often gets the impression that the materially rich typically have at least as many). Ideals of spiritual poverty, on the other hand, often do go together with material poverty, but material poverty which is voluntarily chosen. By contrast, material poverty as it continues to be a hard and daily reality for so many around the globe usually is decidedly involuntary and, moreover, typically certainly not an ideal but something bad to get rid of.[3] (I will come back to these points below.) In order to firmly focus on these hard daily realities, I will understand poverty as material not spiritual.

Poverty concerns a lack of real freedoms

However, if one were to say nothing more, it would not be very clear what kind of a lack poverty is. More precisely, just what kind of problem (if any) is it to lack money and material goods (of certain kinds)? One answer could be: poverty is about the kinds of lack that touch on one’s fundamental needs. However, I will leave aside that answer, and an analysis of the complex concept of a (material) need (cf. Reader 2006), and will instead pursue a – related – answer that is very promising and has been very influential. This answer, which has been developed by, most importantly, Amartya Sen (e.g. 1992, 1993, 1999) and Martha Nussbaum (e.g. 2000),[4] is that poverty is about a lack of real freedoms to be and do certain things (in Sen’s terminology: poverty is about a lack of capabilities to function). More concretely, drawing on Nussbaum’s list of central capabilities (central ‘real freedoms’, that is, freedoms actually to be or do certain things if one wants to), we may among other things think of a lack of freedom to be well-fed if one wants to, or to develop one’s cognitive capacities up to a certain threshold level if one wants to (cf. Nussbaum 2000, p. 78-80). But to my mind one would need to stress – which as far as I can see Sen and Nussbaum do not – that it is only a lack of real freedom associated with a lack of material goods, or with a lack of money, that is to count as poverty. If this not stressed, the concept of poverty will be drawn too broadly. For example, not every lack of freedom to develop one’s cognitive capacities up to a certain threshold level if one wants to, is plausibly a matter of poverty; that is so only for a lack that is associated with a dearth of material means, that is, with not having the material means or the money[5] to attend school etc.

I speak of lacks of real freedom ‘associated’ with a dearth of material means rather than ‘caused’ by a dearth of material means. This is just to be cautious – given that we are talking about very complex situations in which both a lack of very important real freedoms are typically found and a dearth of material means, but where the causality may be difficult to trace, although certain causal connections will exist. Concretely, we are talking about contexts where people are typically subject to violence, badly educated, in poor health, etc., and stuck in such situations, and where they also face a lack of money (income, wealth) and, relatedly, certain important material goods.[6] But how exactly the causality runs, may not always be very clear.[7]

To conceive of poverty as related to a lack of (a threshold level of very important) real freedoms has several important implications. I mention five. First, it seems easy to see why it would (pro tanto) be bad to be poor; it does not seem difficult to explain why lacking very important real freedoms would be a bad thing – at least in a pro tanto sense, that is to say, in a sense where its badness may perhaps sometimes be outweighed by countervailing goods. Secondly, poverty is involuntary. After all, those who voluntarily do without certain goods (or a certain amount of money etc.) could have it if they wanted to, and thus do not, on the characterisation I have given, count as poor. (This is one point where my specification of the concept diverges to some extent from ordinary usage, although it matches with it to a great extent as well, if one thinks of global poverty.) Thirdly, poverty is in an important sense multidimensional: it concerns not having real freedoms to do and be certain things up to a threshold level – things such as eating enough, developing one’s cognitive capacities, having control over one’s material environment. Such components are ‘distinct in quality’ as Nussbaum emphasizes, and ‘we cannot satisfy the need for one of them by giving a larger amount of another one’ (Nussbaum 2000, p. 81). Fourth, poverty is in an important sense objective rather than subjective: one is poor if one lacks certain real freedoms, regardless of whether or not one regards oneself as poor. Conversely, one is not poor if one does not lack certain real freedoms, even if one were to regard oneself as poor. Fifth, poverty is in an important sense[8] absolute rather than relative: what matters for deeming someone poor (or not) is a lack of certain real freedoms, and not whether others also lack these freedoms, or have many more real freedoms (also beyond certain threshold levels).

These conceptual choices matter – they have a number of desirable implications. First, and following up on what was already said above, it seems appropriate to connect poverty with badness but only pro tanto badness. The implication is that it would be strange (but not necessarily conceptually confused[9]) to ask: she is poor but is there also something bad about that? At the same time, it would not be strange to ask: she is poor, but is this in the end (all things considered) a bad thing? (Is the lack of real freedoms perhaps outweighed in some way?) This implication too seems as it should be. Second, ‘voluntary poverty’ seems so distinct a phenomenon from the involuntary poverty that a large part of mankind is still struggling with, that it would perhaps be better even to have a separate term for it.[10] Third, if we want to maintain a link with the lived experiences of poverty it is a good idea to conceive of poverty as being in certain ways multidimensional, because the situations in question typically do have many dimensions (lack of income, violence, bad housing conditions, bad health etc.) (cf. e.g Scheper-Hughes 1993; Anderson 2000). Fourth, understanding poverty in a subjective way would have very unfortunate implications (we would have to consider everyone as poor who regarded themselves as such, and the other way round). Similarly, it would, fifth, have very unfortunate implications to regard everyone who has much less than most others as poor. We would then have to count an owner of a BMW as poor if everyone else drove a Ferrari… All in all, then, the implications of the conceptual choices outlined above seem rather desirable.Poverty: absolute but time-relative

Let me somewhat further discuss one aspect of relativity concerning poverty. This discussion serves to further illustrate the approach taken above, and also how delicate it sometimes is to arrive at an acceptable conception of poverty. I want to argue that we should adopt a conception of poverty that is an important sense not place-relative but that is in an important sense time-relative. Let me explain.

Above, I defended a conception of poverty in which poverty is a matter of lacking real freedoms, associated with a lack of material resources. We can think of real freedoms to have enough to eat – to be able to eat enough if one wants to –, to develop one’s cognitive capacities to a certain extent, and to have meaningful social relationships to a certain extent. I assume and do not defend that such a characterization of poverty (which refers to particular real freedoms) holds everywhere. What I do want to defend is that poverty is not very sensitive to place in the following sense: that in order to, say, develop one’s cognitive capacities to a certain critical degree, in Zimbabwe primary education in a classroom of sixty without decent teaching materials would be sufficient, whereas in the Netherlands one would need schools with much smaller classes and better books (as well as iPads…). No; it is plausible that the classroom needs for developing one’s cognitive capacities to a critical degree are much more similar in Zimbabwe and the Netherlands. This goes for many other real freedoms as well. Of course, there may be exceptions. For example, what is needed in a culture to maintain meaningful social relationships can vary (for example, to what extent needs one be able to give certain kinds of gifts, such as expensive dowries?). But for many real freedoms we should be wary of assuming too quickly that what it takes in the way of resources to realise them up to a threshold level, varies greatly between rich and poor countries; people’s requirements do not vary that much across contexts. (It would often be self-serving for the rich readily to accept great variations here.) One implication, and one that seems appropriate to me, is that whole countries or societies can be rich and that whole countries or societies can be poor. This would be different if we were, for instance, to embrace a form of place-sensitivity which would call those in a society poor who have relatively few resources compared to most people in that society.

On the other hand, the concept of poverty would lose a lot of its usefulness both in many theoretical and many practical contexts if it were not modified through time, in the sense that it is, at every time, made dependent on what then counts a reasonable threshold of certain real freedoms. For example, what is to count as sufficient freedom to be healthy if one wants to, should probably depend on the technical possibilities, and arguably also on the financial etc. resources, which are globally available at a certain point in time. If this were not the case, we

may have to regard everyone in certain ages – for example in the Middle Ages – as poor: they would then all lack, for reasons associated with a dearth of material resources, sufficient real freedoms such as the freedom to be healthy. Similarly, we would have to regard hardly anyone as poor in other times (for example, in a better-off future generation, or perhaps in our own age, especially if there were to be significantly fewer resources left for future generations[11]). Such implications had better be avoided.[12]

3. Poverty, justice, and human rights

So much for the defence of a particular conception of poverty. An acceptable conception of poverty will, I have argued, among other things have to be objective and multidimensional – more particularly, focused on an (involuntary) lack of real freedoms that is associated with a lack of material resources. And it will in important ways have to be absolute. We will now probe what the resulting links between poverty, justice and human rights are, and whether they seem acceptable.

I will understand justice, in the wake of John Rawls, as the ‘first virtue’ of social structures (Rawls 1999, p. 3). As Rawls memorably puts it:

‘Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.’ (ibid.)

This is a widely accepted understanding of justice. The way I conceive of human rights can, I believe, also be widely acceptable, although this cannot, within the scope of the present chapter, be defended. I conceive of them as follows: human rights are the minimum requirements of justice on a global scale (cf. Pogge 2008). I mean this in the following sense: if human rights are realised across the globe the world is, albeit not fully just, just in broad outline; there are no great injustices left. Furthermore, I will say (cf. Shue 1996) that if someone has a human right to X, this is to say, most importantly, that she has a justified claim to important protections of important interest X.[13] Whether a justified claim exists that certain protections or provisions are forthcoming as a matter of human rights – say, certain guarantees that one’s access to food is not jeopardized in certain ways or that one is provided with elementary education – will depend, among other things, on the following:[14]

- On how important the interest in question is;

- On how important the protection in question is; and

- On whether providing the protection in question can plausibly win out vis-à-vis providing other important protections of important interests, where I assume that only part of social wealth and capacities should be spent on protecting important interests.

Now, with these specifications of justice and human rights in place, one can ask whether there can be poverty and yet no injustice, where I will confine myself to human rights. So the question is whether there can be poverty while, at the same time, there are no problems of human rights fulfilment. The answer is that this is not conceptually impossible; but it is not very likely to be the case. To explain: it can, associated with a lack of material resources, be the case that certain real freedoms (e.g. the freedom to develop one’s cognitive capacities) cannot be realized to a threshold level.[15] In such a case, there could very well be poverty, on the specification of poverty that has been given above. (I say that there ‘could very well be’ poverty rather than ‘there will be poverty’ because the above discussion has not gone so far as to identify the specific real freedoms with whose lack poverty is concerned.) At the same time, there may be no human rights problem, on the specification of human rights that was developed above: it may be that human rights do not require that the real freedom in question (e.g. to develop one’s cognitive capacities) be brought to a certain threshold level. For, as I indicated above, human rights may only consume part of the social wealth and resources; so perhaps more important real freedoms or other more important interests, or more important protections, will win out, and providing certain protections regarding the freedom to develop one’s cognitive capacities to a threshold level will not, in the end, be a requirement of human rights.

However, the lack of real freedoms associated with a lack of material means is often very serious. As already indicated, in real-life situations of poverty, unemployment, violence, bad education, bad health, etc. often go together. All of this concerns very important interests. Suppose that it is not especially difficult or costly to take important steps to ensure that these interests are protected. Then providing these protections will often be what human rights require; providing these protections will come out as weightier than providing different protections. Thus it may often be the case that fighting poverty is a requirement of human rights after all.[16] It seems to me that this association between poverty and non-realisation of human rights – that they will often but not always and necessarily, or already for conceptual reasons, go together – is as it should be.[17]

4. To conclude

I have argued that we should understand poverty as material rather than spiritual, and that we should understand it as concerning a lack of important real freedoms – associated with lack of material means – and therefore as involuntary (rather than voluntary), multidimensional (rather than unidimensional), objective (rather than subjective), and importantly absolute (rather than relative).

This is not, and is not meant to be, a complete definition of poverty. And four final caveats should be added. First, I have defended the above conceptual choices by arguing that their implications are rather fortunate. For example, poverty involves badness (a lack of certain real freedoms), but it need not always be bad all-things-considered; and, another example, poverty often, but not always, involves injustice in the sense of human rights not being realised. However, all this does not mean that for each and every policy context the aforementioned conceptual choices are the best, and certainly not that they are enough: one will usually need to specify by the lack of which real freedoms poverty is constituted, and one will need to specify their relevant threshold levels. Also, one may sometimes want to include, say, certain relative or subjective elements in one’s conception of poverty after all, in the light of the role that is envisaged for the conception (it may be part of its aim to make certain people’s own voices heard, or to draw attention to wealth disparities in a society).

More particularly, and this leads to the second point, a conception of poverty will often have a role in reaching political decisions and making policy. Here, one should be aware that certain parties have great (and sometimes vested) interests in a conception of poverty turning out one way rather than another – for example, in the poverty line being restricted to low, absolute levels, such as levels associated with (sometimes outmoded) rather minimal baskets of goods. A fair amount of suspicion may thus be called for in many practical contexts.

Third, one should be aware that it is important who gets to make the decisions, and in particular that there is adequate participation by disadvantaged people themselves. It may sometimes be that there are good initial reasons for adopting a certain conception of poverty, but that via adequate participatory procedures a different conception gets endorsed, and then it may be required to go with that different conception.

Fourth and finally, I have stressed the importance of endorsing a material (rather than a spiritual) conception of poverty, and of regarding poverty as involuntary (rather than voluntary). These are very central aspects of many lived realities of poverty (a Brazilian friend of mine once told me: ‘Poverty is about being stuck’), and it has infelicitous and possibly even dangerous implication if we do away with them. That being said, ideals of voluntary material poverty may be of great value. But perhaps it is better to choose a different term altogether for them.[18] That way, such ideals will be very clearly distinguished from the involuntary material poverty that continues to be a scarring reality for so many people around the globe.

References

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City, New York: Norton.

Dworkin, Gerald (1988), The Theory and Practice of Autonomy, Cambridge: Cambridge

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Marmor, Andrei (2015), ‘What is the Right to Privacy?’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 43, p. 3-

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Nussbaum, Martha (2000), Women and Human Development: the Capabilities Approach,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Philips, Jos (2007), Affluent in the Face of Poverty: On What Rich Individuals Like Us Should

Do, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Philips, Jos (2016), ‘Human Rights and Threats concerning Future People: a Sufficientarian

Proposal,’ in Gerhard Bos & Marcus Düwell (eds.), Human Rights and Sustainability: Moral

Responsibilities for the Future, Abingdon: Routledge.

Pogge, Thomas (2008), World Poverty and Human Rights, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Rawls, John (1971), A Theory of Justice, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Reader, Soran (ed., 2006), The Philosophy of Need, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy (1993), Death Without Weeping. The Violence of Every-day Life in

Brazil, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sen, Amartya (1992), Inequality Reexamined, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Sen, Amartya (1993), ‘Capability and Well-Being’, in Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (eds.).

The Quality of Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 30–53.

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Princeton University Press. (2^nd ed.)

[1] Work drawing on the so-called Capability Approach, which was initiated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, may come closest (e.g. Sen 1992, 1993, 1999; Nussbaum 2000).

A subsidiary contribution that the article aims to make will be to provide an overview of a number of important conceptual possibilities that we face when thinking about poverty. Getting explicit about these possibilities may in itself already help the analysis of poverty.

[2] Griffin 2008, p.3. Griffin was talking about human rights. To illustrate the idea (the illustration is mine, not Griffin’s): if I were going to call a table what everyone else calls a window, my analysis will not in any helpful way an analysis of what a table is.

[3] For a very interesting discussion which makes some similar points see the classic book of liberation theology, Gutiérrez 1972.

[4] However, Nussbaum’s stated concern is minimum justice, and she does not explicitly emphasise poverty. There are differences (see Section 3 below) but many features of her account are still useful for my purposes. Cf. footnote 17 below.

[5] The exact specification that is needed here (certain specific material means, certain amounts of money) will depend on the institutional and cultural context that one is talking about: it will depend on how the economy and trade are organised and the like.

[6] I have sketched this for Brazilian poverty in Philips 2007, Ch. 1.

[7] Relatedly, simply providing money is not always the solution to what is bad about poverty.

[8] I (again) say ‘in an important sense’ because there may be other senses of absolute/relative (and objective/subjective, unidimensional/multidimensional) where the judgements about my conception of poverty would turn out differently. A few different senses of absolute/relative will be discussed below.

[9] It is not conceptually confused because it is possible to deny that a lack of real freedoms is pro-tanto a bad thing.

[10] Many thanks to Willem Marie Speelman for pointing out that St. Francis called ‘voluntary poverty’ vivere sine proprio, living without property.

[11] For some interesting thought experiments along these lines, see Mulgan 2014.

[12] Of course, as will also be emphasised below, this is hardly the last word on the issue. For example, if a conception of poverty were to be proposed for use in public contexts, it should also be considered to what extent it is liable to political abuse. I will come back to this below.

[13] More particularly, I take it that (at a level of abstraction such as that of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) only those important interests can qualify which concern broad categories of people across place and time. Important interests that concern smaller categories of people, e.g. the highly musically gifted, can qualify under more general descriptions (e.g. under a claim to being able to develop one’s creative capacities to a reasonable extent).

The approach I take to rights in the text is a so-called interest approach rather than a will-approach. This is a widely used approach (cf. Marmor 2015, p. 4) but within the present scope it cannot be defended why I take it.

[14] Cf. Philips (2016) for further defence of the point that follow. I also defend there that whether some protection will in the end have to be provided as a matter of human rights, is not to be determined in a utilitarian manner.

[15] A real freedom to function in a certain way means that one can so function if one wants to; it means that certain protections of so functioning are in place. It is a very important question just which protections – and the answer to this question is often not sufficiently developed by authors who speak of real freedoms. However, I lack the space to elaborate on this question here.

[16] One other reason why the two will go together at many a time is that both what human rights require and what counts as poverty is plausibly dependent on the global wealth and resources that are available at a given point in time. One complication which makes for this sometimes not to be the case is that it is sometimes very hard and difficult to end the ‘multidimensional conspiracy’ (the expression is Albert Hirschmann’s) of poverty. How to overcome situations where a lack of income, a lack of education, violence, bad health, etc. are intertwined?

[17] It may be objected that human rights, on many articulations, contain such rights as that to a decent standard of living or to be safe. But the question is more particularly which protections such rights require. It should not be assumed too quickly that these protections are the exact same ones that are needed for someone not to count as poor. (To get greater clarity about this would require a fuller development of one’s notion of human rights and of one’s notion of poverty.)

[18] Cf. footnote 11 above.