Jan
31
Should We Be Giving Aid to Pakistan?
Filed Under Mindful Ideas | 2 Comments
It’s ironic that as I write this, Pakistan is once again in the news as a hotspot of extremism and violence. I often select topics for this blog well ahead of time, and am sometimes writing about events that occurred several weeks ago. My original intent had been to discuss multiple articles expressing concern with Pakistan’s continuously inadequate response to the growing power of Islamic extremism within its borders, the tenuous relationship that our country shares with Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, and the rather glaring problem of Pakistan’s status as a nuclear power. Since then, however, presidential hopeful and advocate for democratic reform Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated, and Pakistan is in a state of chaos. The question of whether we should be giving aid to Pakistan is timelier than ever.
It is important to note that the term should carries a special connotation with regard to ethics and is more significant than the should that we use in everyday conversation. Ethically speaking, should is a reference to our moral responsibility. When asking the question of whether we should give aid to Pakistan, I am more specifically questioning whether we have a moral responsibility to do so.
This question requires that we first consider whether we should be giving foreign aid to anyone. There are several viewpoints that we ought to consider here, and we will focus on one prominent view for why we should give foreign aid, and one view of why we perhaps should not give foreign aid at all.
Opponents of the U.S.’s massive foreign aid spending focus on the lack of positive impact that such programs have wrought. We spend billions of dollars on foreign aid every year, mostly in the Third World, and it is difficult to cite even one nation that has noticeably improved itself, in terms of measurable qualities like increased standard of living or economic growth, as a direct result of foreign aid. Often, U.S. foreign aid is military in nature and not earmarked for uses that would benefit most citizens of recipient nations. Rather, U.S. foreign aid is predominantly part of a greater military and economic strategy.
In the case of Pakistan, for example, we provide a massive amount of military aid in the hope that Musharraf, a sympathetic ruler and one of the only barriers against an extremist Islamic takeover, can maintain control and be a long-standing ally in a highly volatile region. U.S. oil interests are paramount in this region, and if the oil suddenly dried up, our interest in giving Pakistan piles of U.S. tax dollars would largely disappear as well.
The argument here is that U.S. aid does not lead to good consequences, and is motivated by self-interest. These are important ethical concerns, as a consequentialist would likely have rule against continuing foreign aid programs. A Kantian, especially a strict Kantian who believes that self-interest cannot be the motivator of moral actions, would also have to vote down foreign aid programs, at least those that are clearly based solely on U.S. interests.
The advocate of foreign aid clearly has some work to do, but we shall do our best to help. One fairly compelling argument for the continuation of aid programs rests on the principle of justice, in one form or another. For our purposes, we will consider an argument that utilizes the concept of retributive justice. This is the form of justice that is best expressed in the maxim “an eye for an eye.” Retributive justice states that wrongs should be balanced by comparable punishments.
At an international level, the historical record strongly supports the claim that at least some of the prosperity of European nations and their North American descendants has been at the expense of their former colonies. Most of Africa and many parts of Asia were once highly profitable colonial outposts for Western Europe, while the exploitation of cheap Third World labor and less stringent environmental laws continues to benefit the massively successful American economy. We owe the Third World something, and foreign aid is the most direct and obvious means of repaying our debts.
This viewpoint has decidedly liberal foundations, and it assumes a certain interpretation of history, one that I think is mostly correct. Either way, historical interpretation has a significant role to play in our ability to support or oppose foreign aid programs. On one view, aid programs are ineffective and self-interested, therefore they ought to be done away with. On the other hand, foreign aid is a measurable way to right past injustices and seek a global balance.
I fear we have done little to answer the general question of whether we should give foreign aid at all, never mind the more specific question of providing aid to Pakistan. Both viewpoints considered thus far require empirical validation. We must investigate the claim that aid programs do not help and are self-interested, as well as the view that our prosperity has been at the expense of others. I will not attempt this here, but I will propose the possibility that in answering our questions, we must look not only at whether or not to provide aid, but in what form aid programs are most likely to be helpful. While military aid is guilty of the above charges, development aid, such as the transfer of efficient energy production technologies, seems a better candidate for success. The important thing is that we not only answer the question of whether we should help other nations be more prosperous, but also how we should go about such an endeavor.
Jan
23
Georgia’s Water Crisis: The Ethics of Resource Allocation
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As of this writing, the greater Atlanta area continues to be in the grip of one of the worst droughts on record. Hopefully it will rain soon and disaster will be averted. Regardless of how this particular incident plays out, it speaks to a growing social and ethical concern. The swelling population and irascible consumption of Americans is problematic on many levels, but one rarely visited issue is the ever-more-apparent reality that our current numbers may exceed the availability of our most vital natural resources, including fresh water.
Let us briefly consider some of the questions that have emerged during the Georgia crisis. Many Atlanta-area politicians have expressed outrage at wildlife management agencies who manage the headwaters of their water supply. Apparently, there is a mandate in place requiring that a certain amount of water be released from the supply reservoir and sent downstream in order to preserve the habitat of several threatened species of freshwater mussels. Numerous fish that live in the watershed are also reliant upon this daily purging. In the eyes of the Atlanta politicians, this represents an appalling act of waste. The federal requirement that water be released, they believe, takes a backseat to the water needs of Atlanta’s citizens.
Questions of species priority and the rights of nonhuman animals is a significant one in environmental ethics, especially as it relates to allocation of vital resources that humans, fish, and mussels have equal need for in order to survive. Although it is tempting and easy for humans to lay claim to whatever they need as a kind of natural birthright, the ethicist must ask if such a right exists and how one might justify this claim. One might argue that by allowing its population to exceed available resources, Atlanta has made itself vulnerable to natural selection. It hardly seems appropriate to punish mussels and fish for our mistakes, but this is precisely what many Atlanta lawmakers are suggesting.
Another important issue related to the ethics of natural resource allocation concerns future generations. Consider the Atlanta situation again. If we were to allow water to be diverted from the mussels and fish who live downstream to the citizens of Atlanta, countless human lives would be saved while numerous mussels and fish would die. Is that fair to future citizens of Atlanta, who might want the option of enjoying the mussels and fish? Is it good social policy to place band-aids on what is clearly a disaster waiting to happen, in the hope that someone else can figure out how to quench the thirst of Atlanta’s emerging megalopolis? Do we not owe our children the opportunity to live in a world that is not ridiculously overpopulated and that has fresh water available, not to mention mussels and fish?
These questions seem simple to answer, until we add that the most obviously appropriate solution, continuing to release water from the reservoir while seeking a realistic solution to this problem, must come on the backs of current citizens. For some reason, it is difficult to convince living humans to sacrifice for the sake of humans who are not here yet. But natural resource concerns require that we make these kinds of choices. In many areas of our country, water supplies are dwindling faster than they are being replaced, populations are swelling exponentially, and arid deserts that have been made to seem inhabitable are becoming increasingly less so.
There are no easy answers to questions about how to use, preserve, and share our precious natural resources. What is clear is that the ethics of such issues are not limited to how the current human generation might be impacted. A comprehensive approach to the relevant ethical questions requires us to consider the needs and rights of future generations and nonhuman animals, rather than the hedonistic self-preservation to which we have grown accustomed.