Asian-Arab philosophical dialogues on globalization, democracy ...

Poverty and Globalization
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Asia-<strong>Arab</strong> Philosophical Dialogues on Globalization, Democracy and Human Rights
Ali Benmakhlouf, Morocco
“I hate poverty as much as I hate pain” says Montaigne in his Essays (1588). Just as all people have
experience of pain, half of them have experience of poverty, according to the United Nations
Development Program (UNDP). But as Montaigne says, there is a strong parallel between the two, as
one’s (pain) helps us to measure the other’s (poverty). Brazilians who met Montaigne in Rouen in the
16th century were very surprised to find beggars in Europe. According to them, people cannot live
without solidarity, abandoning some human beings.
As Fichte, the German philosopher of the beginning of the eighteenth century says as long as poor
people exist, as long as homeless people exist, having nothing to protect their bodies, the social contract
is a meaningless rationality.
At first, poverty is an economic question but many philosophers, as the Indian Nobel Prize recipient
Amartya Sen and the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, do not want to interpret it only on the
basis of the category of quantity. According to Sen for instance, “the substantial poverty, in terms of
privation of capability, is often more settled than its echo which we grasp in the field of incomes”. 32
Justice and Good Life: Aristotle Revisited
Putting together the question of justice and that of a good life, we meet Aristotle’s interest in a society
which is sufficiently unified to lead to happiness, but not wholly unified to avoid Plato’s Republic which
seems now, after the famous book of Popper The Open Society and its Enemies, an enemy to freedom and
mutual respect. If we take as an example the couple disposition/possession that we find in Aristotle’s
Categories, we understand how important it is in the interpretation of a new consideration of the notion
of poverty. Possession is for Aristotle a subclass of quality, which denotes lasting things. The other term,
disposition, is for transitory things. So they are opposite to each other, but there is no ontological
difference between them. The same thing being transitory may, with exercise, become lasting with
duration.
As described, this subclass of quality seems to have nothing to do with our topic. It is a precise notion,
but at first meaningless. Nevertheless, when associated with another Aristotelian notion, namely the
notion of pleonexia (i.e. having more than others, having excessive ambition, domination, cupidity),
possession appears as meaning to have objects in the distributive conflict which is responsible of the
fact that a few acquire more than their due, refusing to others what is due to them.
So let us ask now, what is the link between what is due to a person, in the sense of what is just for them
to have and the idea of possession as a lasting quality? Good life. A life we choose for preserving our
dignity is the link, since we have to be able through the duration of our lives to enjoy things as such as
health and peace. The issue is to connect the question of capability, of possession and of being an agent
doing freely things that contribute to a good life, of having rights and autonomy. We now understand
how poverty can be understood: having a life under submission, not to be able to choose the life we
expect to have, being deprived of capacities as A. Sen says.
The problem is now getting more precise. “Injustice, is understood as the loss of eudemonia, of happiness,
or, as a deficient acknowledgment of human rights, we can go farther on grasping plural criteria telling
us what is due to anyone of us, patients or moral agents” Salvatore Vega says in Quelle philosophie pour
le XXIè siècle. 33
32 Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
33 Vega, Salvatore. 2001. Quelle philosophie pour le XXIè siècle? Folio, Gallimard, p.269.