The Problem of Poverty (MANCEPT)
| Dates: | 4 May 2023 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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Dennis Pirdzuns (University of Manchester
Abstract: Poverty is an obvious moral and political problem. An exceptional unanimity prevails in the
theoretical literature that poverty is morally bad and deeply unjust. But curiously, little attention has yet
been paid specifically to the problem of poverty. This left disagreements to endure on how poverty is
properly defined and what kind of just demands arise from it. The following text shall provide greater
clarity for understanding poverty as a unique distributive problem raising morally urgent demands. In a
first step, conceptual analysis identifies a necessary condition for the definition of poverty. The
conclusion is that poverty’s distributive dimension implies a form of deprivation that is independent of
the overall distribution of goods. This bears on the differences between absolutist and relativist
understandings of poverty as well as the specific implications the Levelling-Down objection has for
determining poverty. In a second step, normative theorising identifies a sufficient condition for
establishing the just demands of poverty, namely the absolute priority of distributing goods towards
those suffering from deprivation. This requires to differentiate between poverty and freedom from
poverty, something several distributive principles are incapable of doing. This section also covers the
irrelevance of responsibility for poverty as well as the right conceptualisation of distributive priority.
The central conclusion is that the notion of ‘less than enough’ is both a necessary condition for the
definition and a sufficient condition for the just demands of poverty. And while equality, utility and
priority principles fail to accommodate this notion, sufficiency principles are well-placed to do so.
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