Poverty

The idea of needs, while always perhaps implicit in the notion of poverty, has come to the fore in contemporary debates. The crux of these debates is whether poverty is necessarily relative. At the root of Hume's critique of the "severe" morality of poverty was his replacement of the categorical distinction between necessity and luxury to one where these are points on a scale. This then enabled him consistently to argue (as many others did likewise) that onetime luxuries could become necessities. Adam Smith defined "necessaries" as "not only commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life but whatever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable, even of the lowest order, to be without." Hence in Smith's time, a day laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt (its nonpossession, indeed, would denote a "disgraceful degree of poverty") when the Greeks and Romans of an earlier age lived very comfortably though they had no linen.

Relative or absolute?

In modern debates, this fluidity in the meaning of necessity has been taken to be a vindication of the "relativity" of poverty. A major advocate of this position is the sociologist Peter Townsend, who declares that poverty can be defined "only in terms of the concept of relative deprivation" (p. 31). More precisely the standard of deprivation is socially relative and Townsend is critical of an "absolute concept" that would be based on some universal, extra-social, notion of "needs." Townsend holds that needs must be defined as more than some biological minimum and, rather, as "the conditions of life which ordinarily define membership of society." These conditions comprise "diets, amenities, standards and activities which are common or customary" (p. 915). The reference to "custom" is a deliberate echo of Smith's argument. The poor are now identified as those who lack the resources to participate in those customary conditions definitive of social membership and who are as a consequence "excluded from ordinary living patterns" (p. 31).

To its critics, Townsend's relativity approach leads to the absurd conclusion that someone could be called poor because they could buy only one Cadillac a day while others in the same community could buy two, or that more people can be "poor" in California than in, for example, Chad. It follows, further, that poverty cannot be eliminated, no antipoverty program can ever be entirely successful. To these critics there has to be an absolute core, since only from such a secure basis is it possible meaningfully to identify poverty and only then does it become possible to conceive of poverty's elimination. Hence the number of people with inadequate sustenance, shelter, and life expectancy is greater in Chad than in California, and, thus, there are more in poverty in the former than in the latter location.

Whether poverty is regarded as a form of social exclusion or as the deprivation of basic needs, the shared assumption is that it is a morally pernicious state of affairs. It is bad in itself because suffering is bad in itself and not, as the "virtuous" view would claim, a condition of "indifference" or even sanctity. This is the modern sensibility and it is now dominant—in no way can poverty be an ideal. The corollary of this is that the existence of poverty is indefensible and there is a moral imperative to seek remediable action, which to be effective is now typically thought to require the activity or intervention of the state. Here the poverty debate enters into the mainstream of contemporary moral, social, and political theory.

Poverty in itself does not reduce people to a rabble; a rabble is created only by the disposition associated with poverty, by inward rebellion against the rich, against society, the government etc.… The rabble do not have sufficient honour to gain their own livelihood through their own work yet claim they have a right to receive their livelihood. No one can assert a right against nature but within the conditions of society hardship at once assumes the form of a wrong inflicted on this or that class. The important question of how poverty can be reconciled is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially.

SOURCE: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 1821.

Contemporary debate.

On one side there are liberals (such as the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek [1899–1992]) who argue that the best remedy to poverty is to permit inequality in the form of wide income differentials so that the incentive to gain these high rewards produces the social wealth (and higher tax revenues) that enables the lot of the impoverished to be improved. Indeed, Hayek claims that in this way "poverty in the absolute sense has been abolished" (vol. 2, p. 139). This belongs in the Smithian tradition—Smith himself had said that universal poverty was conjoined with absolute equality in the earliest (hunter-gatherer) societies. The thrust of the argument here is that what matters morally is individuals having enough to sustain themselves, not that others might have more than enough. On the other side are welfare socialists, like Townsend, who (as previously noted) picks up a different aspect of Smith. Socialists are far less complacent about inequality. Townsend's own prescription is the abolition of "excessive" income and wealth and the establishment of a more egalitarian society. These two positions do not exhaust the field. There are welfare liberals (including John Rawls [1921–2002] in his A Theory of Justice [1971]) who think that inequalities in income and wealth are justified so long as the lot of the least-well-off is maximized. There are also more radical approaches that seek appropriately the root of the problem and locate this in a socially induced emphasis on production and consumption. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, for example and unwittingly echoing Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice (1797) about the American Indians, argues that poverty is a problem created by the market-industrial system and when the lives of those assumed to be in dire poverty, such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari, are examined they can be discerned to live in "a kind of material plenty"—they are content with few possessions. This approach has affinities to environmental or "green" thought, which enjoins what one of its influential sources, E. F. Schumacher, in Small Is Beautiful (1973), has called "Buddhist economics." Without ever expressing the point explicitly it is, from the perspective of the history of ideas, possible to see here a reprise of the ideal of poverty, understood as self-control. The Bushmen have (so to speak) heeded the wisdom of the Stoic sage and have no wants beyond what they need; they do not experience poverty.