Morality and Starvation – Dr. Joe Mendola, Sept. 24, 2009

By On October 6, 2009 · 5 Comments

Over a hundred people listened to Dr. Mendola explain why we owe reparations to the one billion people who live in poverty worlwide.

Over a hundred people listened to Dr. Mendola explain why we owe reparations to the one billion people who live in poverty worlwide.

Story, photos, and slideshow by GEOFF DAVIES

HEAR DR. MENDOLA EXPLAIN WHY WE OWE REPARATIONS TO THE WORLD’S POOR

Dr. Joe Mendola is a philosopher. But even philosophers have morning routines. Right?

Let’s say Dr. Joe shoots out of bed every morning as the cock crows. He puts on his nicest suit and tie, complete with designer elbow patches. He slides into his new shoes, which he treats like newborns even though their leather’s still so stiff they give him blisters. He drinks a coffee, eats a banana or two, and watches the talking heads on the morning news before heading off to work at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he works in the Philosophy department

Let’s say Dr. Joe’s morning route runs alongside a little pond. On this particular morning there’s a kid in the middle of the pond, struggling to keep his head above water. Now, Dr. Joe is faced with a moral dilemma, something which he is bound to take seriously given he teaches ethical philosophy to graduate students. He could save the kid no problem, but his leather shoes would be ruined and there’d be muck all over his Armani gear.

To do nothing would be wrong, morally speaking. Right? There were slightly more than a hundred people in the room when Dr. Mendola presented this dilemma during his Morality and Starvation lecture on Thursday night. A show of hands showed almost all agreed with Dr. Mendola on that point.

But when Dr. Joe goes through his hypothetical morning routine, he doesn’t mail a cheque to UNICEF between donning his suit and drinking his coffee. Instead, he throws out the pamphlet that came in the morning mail. Is this morally wrong? Most are inclined to say No.

But here’s the catch. When Dr. Joe encounters the drowning kid, he lands in moral hot water if he just keeps going along the merry way. He does nothing, and someone else suffers as a result. Same thing goes for the UNICEF example. A child somewhere starves, or dies of starvation, because Dr. Joe didn’t send a donation to get them fed. Both cases have non-action as the cause of harm, Dr. Mendola explained, yet only one seems morally reprehensible. At least, upon first glance.

Borrowing from author Peter Singer, Dr. Mendola used these scenarios to show a broader dispute in moral philosophy. Some say the individual is only responsible for their actions. Others maintain we ought to be held accountable for all the consequences of our actions, both for what we do and what we don’t do, such as failing to give to a cause. The peculiar thing about the two scenarios Dr. Mendola laid out – the drowning kid and the UNICEF cheque – is forces both camps to agree, at least on one particular case.

Dr. Mendola counts himself as consequentialist, one of those thinkers who think that non-actions can also be morally reprehensible because it’s the consequences that count. But, he says, he’s a weird kind of consequentialist. That’s because he thinks “group acts” work in the same way.

A “group act,” he says, happens when a group of people are all engaged in a single action. It can be a couple trying to work out their differences, or a department of university profs lobbying their bosses for something or other. Those are all group acts, and Dr. Mendola, being a consequentialist, says that their moral goodness or badness depends above all else on their consequences. So even if your impact on the group has only the slightest effect – like that of your drive to the grocery store on the polar ice caps – the moral weight is just as heavy. And same goes for what you do as much as for what you neglect to do.

And here’s how we get to the main issue of the CCEPA-sponsored lecture. According to Dr. Mendola, about a billion people living in the world do so in extreme poverty. Thousands of them die daily from the effects of starvation. All it would take, he says, is 1.25 per cent of the well-off world’s income to fix this for good.

But this, of course, hasn’t happened. Sin number one.

In fact, the way we live our lives in the developed world perpetuates a system that – in many ways and for many reasons – oppresses, hurts, and kills the poverty-stricken. It’s a group act of sorts in which we and our elected officials participate. Sin number two.

So what’s to be done? According to Dr. Mendola’s philosophical take, we have morally erred. We do it everyday. And world-wide systemic wrongs are righted in the same way as mundane, daily ones.

In his view, we owe the planet’s poor reparations.

How to do it? What to do? Those are questions a little too large for the St. Mary’s University lecture hall and the hour-and-a-half we had that night. Having a single night to reflect on poverty on starvation, like having a single blog post to explain a branch of ethical philosophy, is grossly inadequate. In both cases, we’re back at the shallow pond. And we’re just skimming the surface.

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  • Hamish Calder

    I attended Mendola’s lecture, and whilst I concur largely with his message of consequences, I felt that actually the question of what an individual can do abt world starvation needed further thought. I think that society has failed, and that cheques aren’t working – oxfam started in 60s, but the problem is worse now-arguably? We prob need to work in groups, but new ones that will engage the pond success against the letter failure. I felt the lecture was too caught up in the nuances of approach rather than the core question of what future action is needed. To eradicate world poverty can be done in cash terms with a fraction of US military budget, but how to sustain even if cash was forthcoming?

  • Geoff

    Hi Hamish, thanks for weighing in.

    I would agree that the lecture focused mainly on what you call “nuances of approach.” The thing is, these “nuances” consisted, I would argue, in the morals at work behind the issue of world poverty. Half the topic, right? It’s not that the “shallow pond” example was a success and the “envelope/cheque” example was a failure. Once deconstructed, they are the same – morally speaking: in both cases one acts immorally by failing to act. I think Mendola used these examples moreso as a call to action: we think one is acceptable, yet not the other, so isn’t it time we changed our ways of thinking?

    As for how to proceed from there, now THAT is a tougher question. Mendola did distinguish between individual and governmental approaches to dealing with global poverty. NGOs, I take it, fall somewhere in between. Which approach – or combination thereof – ought to serve best moving forward … now ain’t that the million dollar question? Maybe cheques won’t do any longer … but what alternatives do are you suggesting?

  • Hamish Calder

    Thanks for that. My view is that individual consciousness needs to be raised to get the start. Until enough individuals are committed to stir groups to sustainable action, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere as the media is so vast we blank out our indignation by the sheer multitude of tragedies spotlighted. It could be governments pushed by their electorates, but so far it doesn’t seem to be a priority. The world vision concept meets some success by personalising it. My guess is that young people should have to be exposed to it in a personal way – perhaps as part of their education, an experience that would stay with them all their lives. Band Aid was a catalyst, but in the end you need countries working together, as supra-national orgs like the UN cannot themselves do it. To me the answer might lie in the local linkage between person and problem that people can identify with. For instance a lady in Scotland started providing lunches for school children in Africa. Its quite a big thing now (Mary’s Meals). Sustainability is maybe helped by the dramatic appeal. Perhaps to get the pond action, boatloads of starving children should be brought to the Western world to confront and then stir our morality until we are forced to to remedy by tackling the source. A bit like the Vietnamese ships in the 70s. I don’t have the answer but its well worth thinking about.

  • Geoff

    Sort of like Canada World Youth made mandatory? Seems like a tall order, but would certainly be a great experience. I take it the question is, though, once you get individuals engaged, how to make positive headway. As individuals? Governments? NGOs? It’s hard to imagine a way which doesn’t involve throwing money at an issue, since, as you say, the cheques don’t work.

  • Hamish Calder

    I still feel there’s a big difference in envelope and pond as the former demands quite a few assumptions to link the cheque with saving a life, or giving a respite for a short period. The Times (UK) East African correspondent has said recently that no one should give money to save the 23m people in drought conditions in his area – since the situation won’t change until the people are educated enough to get rid of corrupt leadership. The real difference with the pond is that you can believe you are saving a life by yr direct experience. And problem solved. No need for sustainable action. And where do you stop in the envelope scenario, how many envelopes? Better to give a hungry man a ham sandwich here in Halifax…. We can throw money at an issue if we are sure it makes a difference. We can only do this if we see the cause and effect, and really this is best achieved at a local level – where some proper oversight of the progression of the hunger can be monitored. So, a church or group of churches can send someone out and report back. A town or province could be “twinned” with a needy place in Africa so we could all see whats happening and arrest any doubts on cause and effect. The big charities are possibly too supranational and big for people to sustain a common community type effort. I think the localised input is hugely important to combat cynicism and foster a sustained solidarity. Long standing, big amorphous organisations might be more susceptible to perpetuating their own existences as an end in itself, rather than the means to save the hungry. I have digressed a bit, but its a big subject.