Courtesy : essay.utwente.nl

Eradicating poverty technology latest

Looking at the current state of the world, it is remarkable that while
the highest levels of welfare have risen steadily over the past centuries,
most of the world’s population still lives under circumstances marked
by deprivation. Four billion people are deprived of sufficient
nutrition, clean water, health care, education, or other needs for a

Millenium Development Goals: 2012 progress chart,

4basic level of welfare. As Nelson Mandela – among others – claimed,
this is not an issue of charity, but an issue of justice. That claim gives
the problem another dimension: a moral one. Not being charitable is
not immoral, but being unjust is. So why is extreme poverty a problem
of justice? Can justice really help solve the problem? And would
everybody agree with that?
Despite the attention that extreme poverty has received in the last
decades, the results of fighting it are not impressive. There are of
course the stories of some countries in Asia and South America that
have seen a steady increase in economic growth, increasing the living
conditions for many of their citizens, but for many other countries –
especially in Africa – poverty proves to be difficult to eradicate.
So why don’t we transfer the ‘proven’ principles? For the rich
countries in the world, the road to wealth was paved with technology.
Sanitation, medicine, the printing press, steam engines, motorized
transport, and communication technologies are just a few of the
technologies that have driven the welfare levels up, directly or
indirectly. Can’t we use these technologies to justly improve the living
conditions of people in less developed countries?
1.1 Problem description
The problem area that I have described has multiple aspects: justice,
human development, and technology. Justice concerns the observation
that many people live under conditions that are below our standards
of human dignity, while at the same time others live in excessive
wealth. Human development is in the list because we want people to
develop their lives, not only accept that what is given out of charity.
This is nicely described with the Chinese proverb “Give a man a fish
and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a
lifetime”. Technology has always been a driving force in human
development and it may be put to use to advance human
development. Together, these aspects form the parts of the main
question that I will investigate:


How can the lives of the poor be given attention and
improved in a just way in the development of new
technologies and the introduction of existing
technologies?
The aim of my research, and the type of answer I hope to give, is to
describe a process that will lead to technologies that can fulfill the goal
of improving the lives of the poor in a just way. How these
technologies should actually be designed is outside the scope of this
paper, though it will sometimes be touched upon. To find the answer
to the main question, I will first discuss three issues that are important
in the question. First, I will elaborate on the idea of justice that I will
use, after that I will look into poverty, followed by an account of the
influence of technology. In the end, these three sub-questions will
form the basis for answering the main question concerning the
development of new and the introduction of existing technologies.
The first main topic that I will discuss is justice, more
precisely its distributive part: justice that deals with what people are
entitled to. Part of the discussion of justice will be about what counts
a good life. The topic of the next chapter will be poverty ,
in which I will use the earlier conception of justice to discuss when
people can be considered to be poor. The third topic will be what the
influence of technology can be on human lives : how, if at
all, could technology actually influence the lives of people? Finally,
given these definitions of justice and poverty, and the description of
the role of technology on human lives, I will discuss how
the creation and introduction of technologies can take place so that
the improvement of the lives of the poor is taken into account.

2 JUSTICE AND WELL-BEING
“But in this new century, millions of people in the
world’s poorest countries remain imprisoned, enslaved,
and in chains. They are trapped in the prison of
poverty. It is time to set them free. Like slavery and
apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it
can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of
human beings. And overcoming poverty is not a gesture
of charity. It is the protection of a fundamental human
right, the right to dignity and a decent life. While
poverty persists, there is no true freedom.”
The words of Nelson Mandela sound true, at least to me: it does not
feel right that so many people are starving, while so many others live
in excessive wealth. But is the current distribution of standards of
living in the world merely uncomforting or can we really call it
unjust?2
When it is the former, we cannot put any strong demands on
those who have a high standard of living to help those who have a
much lower standard. When we want to demand action, then we
should argue that there is an injustice in the world: that those who

2
In Kantian terms, are we talking about duties of virtue (virtutis) or duties of rights
(juris)?
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cannot live a decent life have a claim on the more fortunate to do
them justice.
My goal for this chapter is therefore to formulate a theory of justice
focused on poverty that I can use in further chapters. First, I will
introduce the term justice, to clarify the further discussion. Next, I
will look at the theories of justice of three modern philosophers: John
Rawls, who has written the most influential book on justice of the last
century; Amartya Sen, who has described a new approach to look at
poverty and justice; and finally Martha Nussbaum, who has built
further on the work of Sen, but has given more attention to how his
ideas can be put into practice by governments. I will analyze these
three views to come to a theory of justice that will be used throughout
the rest of this thesis.
2.1 Conceptualizing Justice
As we shall see, there are many different variations of the idea of
justice. In very broad terms, justice is about “giving people what is due
to them” (Swift 2006), as can be also read in the Nicomachean Ethics
by Aristotle (350BC). It is not about what would be nice or good for
people to have (giving that would be charity or virtue), but what they
have a right to3
. To which things and how much thereof people have a
right, and how we make sure people get what is due to them, are
issues on which the different conceptions4
of justice vary among each
other. Often we cannot simply say that these conceptions are right or
wrong and there may be no other choice than to agree to disagree.
The different conceptions of the concept of justice must be seen as
the result of different goals, and contexts, and different starting

For a good explanation of how to interpret rights in the light of this chapter, see
(Nussbaum 2000).
4
“The ‘concept’ is the general structure, or perhaps the grammar, of a term…. A
‘conception’ is the particular specification of that ‘concept’, obtained by filling out some
of the detail”(Swift 2006, p. 11).
J U S T I C E A N D W E L L – B E I N G

points; and they must be evaluated with these in mind. I will now first
set out the playing field in which the different theories of justice
contest, so that we have a basis from which differences between the
theories can be analyzed. The playing field will be based on the
prominent concepts in earlier thought on justice: social order,
freedom and equality.
SOCIAL ORDER
The first concept, social order, marks an important distinction that
we have to make in theories about justice: the intended goal. Is it
aiming at a complete set of rules that will result in a perfectly just
society? Or do we want a less demanding theory that may be easier to
implement? These differences were already described by Plato
(360BC): against the Socratic ideal of perfectly virtuous human
behavior, some opponents posed a more practical position. BecauseSocrates idea seems so far from reality, they said that social order is
based on reciprocity: arrangements for mutual benefits. This entails
the idea that ‘what goes around comes around’; so when I treat
someone badly, I can expect to be treated badly myself, so I better
treat others like I want them to treat me.
Besides this schism between an ideal and a more practical goal,
there are many different ideas of how to treat others well and what a
good life for oneself looks like. Amartya Sen recalls (2009, p. 20-21)
the Sanskrit notion of matsyanyaya, or ‘justice in the world of fish’,
meaning that big fish can freely devour little fish. In the context of
fish, this may very well be called just and notions from biology about
‘survival of the fittest’ fit this kind of justice very well. However, the
people who would want this concept to apply in the world of man will
probably form a minority, though they might very well exist.
FREEDOM
Freedom is a term that is often used in many different forms. As we
will see, the biggest difference is that between ‘being free from
P O V E R T Y & T E C H N O L O G Y

interference’ and that of ‘really being able to do something’. Two
examples to clarify this distinction: consider that you are walking in a
city and see a man begging for money. You only have a one euro coin,
but you feel empathy for him and you have decided that when you
reach him, you will give him that euro. But when you reach him, he
suddenly pulls forth a knife and demands that you give him one euro.
Frightened, you give him the euro and quickly walk away. The result
would have been equal whether he had threatened you or not, but
what about your freedom? Next, you are walking past an election
location and you see a woman, who has the freedom to vote, ready to
make her voice heard. But at the bottom of the stairs before the
entrance, she looks up helplessly from her wheelchair. Nobody stops
her from voting, but does she really have the freedom to vote?
EQUALITY
Equality is a less difficult concept, but there needs to be some
caution about how the term is used. In its most strict (mathematical)
form, equality means that two things are exactly the same. In the
justice debates, however, a softer definition of equality is at play. This
conception does not demand absolute equality on every point, but
equality on points that are relevant. Thus when we are talking about
equality, we must always give the characteristic(s) that the equality is
based on, or otherwise it must mean the hard definition of total
equality5
. This means that we must always, as Amartya Sen puts it, ask
ourselves: equality of what?

Claiming that all people should be equal is thus arguing for a world of clones, whereas
claiming that all people should be equal in the rights they have is a more common
stance.
J U S T I C E A N D W E L L – B E I N G

FREEDOM AND EQUALITY
Though freedom and equality are sometimes thought to be fighting
for the priority in theories of justice, Sen shows that this is a
categorical mistake. Theories of justice, he explains, can be analyzed in
terms of two different categories. The first category is that of the
relevant personal features, and the second that of the combining
characteristics. The personal features can be e.g. happiness, rights,
resources or freedom and the combining characteristics can be e.g.
summation, maximal minimum or equality. When we consider for
example the standard utilitarian approach (which says that we should
aim for the greatest utility) the relevant personal feature is happiness
and the combining characteristic is summation (Sen 1995).
In discussing theories about justice, we thus need to look at (at
least) three aspects: the goal of the theory, what it is that we should
look at to evaluate the position of a person, and how we want that
evaluation to take place. With these three points in mind, I will now
discuss three influential modern theories of justice.
2.2 Theories of justice: Rawls, Sen and Nussbaum
After the Second World War, welfare steadily increased in the
Western world but so did the social and economic inequalities. In
many European countries, these inequalities were dampened by
extensive social welfare systems, but less so in e.g. the United States
(Bourguignon and Morrisson 2007). The problem of how to deal with
these inequalities led to a new attention to justice. In this section I
will give an overview of three different conceptions of justice. The first
is John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness. His theory has been very
influential in this field and no work on justice can do without either
stating how it is influenced by Rawls or where it differs from Rawls’
theory. The second and third theories are two versions of what is
called the Capability Approach. This approach is often used in
theoretical as well as empirical discussions about poverty and
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12
therefore fits in well with the focus of my thesis on poverty. The
Capability Approach was pioneered by Amartya Sen in the 1980’s. In
the 1990’s, Martha Nussbaum joined him in the development of the
approach, but they have distinct conceptions of the approach.