By the end of his pontificate in April of 2005, Pope John Paul II completed one hundred and four major overseas journeys to countries on every inhabited continent, and inched forwa
As I write this, in November I97I, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical care. The suffering and death that are occurring there now are not inevit
On common accounts, we have a state of justice when everyone has their due. The study of justice has been concerned with what we owe one another, what obligations we might have to
Poverty is generally perceived as a moral problem that needs to be resolved. Philosophical discussions of poverty concern the conceptualization of poverty, its particular nature as
Power has always been a central category of political thought and theory; its counterparts, powerlessness or vulnerability, and more generally finitude, have seemingly been much le
In this article I present four central challenges for Hennie Lötter’s book Poverty, Ethics and Justice. The first criticism takes issue with Lötter’s focus on social rather than gl
God blesses those who come to the aid of the poor and rebukes those who turn away from them: "Give to him who begs from you, do not refuse him who would borrow from you"; "you rece
The principle of the universal destination of goods requires that the poor, the marginalized and in all cases those whose living conditions interfere with their proper growth shoul
Poverty relates primarily to privations in respect of material resources, opportunities, and social power, and secondarily to immediate effects of these. There are two broad understandings of poverty: relational or relative, and non-relational or absolute. An individual or group or society is relatively poor if its resources are significantly less than some relevant comparative. While this notion of poverty is easy to grasp and commonly used, most obviously in comparisons between social groups or societies, it has the implausible implication that those who by comparison with the previous generation are affluent are nevertheless deemed poor by comparison with yet more affluent groups. This is reason to look at the idea of absolute poverty and how that might be measured. A favoured approach is to think about what human beings need if they are to have the chance of a worthwhile life. This includes housing, clothing, sanitation, food, access to education and basic health, employment and protection from threats of violence, coercion and theft. These needs are defined in terms of the attainment of basic human goods, and poverty is then specified in terms of a minimum necessary for the satisfaction of these needs. The two understandings of poverty can be combined but the absolute notion is the more basic and robust one.