Careful stalkers will note that I already wrote something like this on Facebook, but since it's still on my mind:
Once of my conversation partners gave me an article about Thomas Pogge, a member of the Yale philosophy department who has recently doing some high-profile work about the obligation of wealthier nations to help poor populations. Apparently, he has a project that aims to get drug companies to lower the costs of their products (and so make drugs available to poorer nations) in exchange for some special compensation from nations like the US. The idea would be that we comparably wealthy people keep paying what we're paying, and the drug companies maintain a healthy profit... so this doesn't require that evil 'socialist medicine' that John McCain and others are sworn to fight.
So then I was thinking about the average American, and how he ('he', because men are more average than women) might be talked into financially supporting the health of less wealthy populations. Here's the thought: about the only thing that really gets people going in the US is fear. World-wide epidemics are freakin' scary. One of the best ways to lower the odds of a world-wide epidemic would be to have better world-wide health. Would something like this work as an advertising campaign for organizations like Partners in Health? Is anyone already doing it?
I'm going to go eat a banana now and read some Allan Gibbard, I think.
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UPDATE
Turns out the Sen. Kennedy is making something close to this argument (though only in national terms, unfortunately). From the NY Times:
“Everyone is at risk,” he said in a statement, “when the people who serve our food, clean our offices and care for our elderly can’t take time off and get well.”
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Not only Senator Kennedy, of course. The securitization of concern for global health and health policy reform is a well-worn position, with, as its critics note, the problem of not very convincingly capturing the importance (morally and practically) of fully acknowledging the dignity of citizens of the developing countries above and beyond the security threats their health deprivations might bring about for us. David Fidler is a proponent of the securitization approach worth checking out, though (also, James Orbinski has some very good criticisms of the approach that shouldn't be hard to find). - ML
ReplyDeleteThanks. Why is this move called 'secularization'? Would there be something non-secular about just appealing the badness of human suffering?
ReplyDeleteAnd I certainly hope nobody would think that such arguments are a replacement for purely moral arguments - just a motivational supplement.
one fear you might have is that the motivational supplement could undermine the moral arguments' effects if articulated without care. so for instance, viewing citizens of countries in which a health scare originates as vectors of disease, threats to our security, etc., could do harm to the possibility of broadening concern for the dignity of many of these unfortunate individuals.
ReplyDeleteOh, right - that wasn't 'secularization.' Words shouldn't be allowed to get that long anyways.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there's much risk of damaging Americans' concern for the dignity of other people. Our country's level of concern is criminally pathetic (e.g. in our donating vastly, vastly more to Harvard and Yale than to Oxfam or Unicef). Maybe there are some populations that have a positive, but fragile respect for the poor that we need to take care not to shake up, but the American population doesn't seem one of them.
Interesting, though.
Thanks for responding Colin. Damage, of course, is one thing (as you rightly say, it would presuppose having something that could respectably be said to be capable of being damaged). Inhibition/prevention/reinforcement of a key obstacle to progress is quite another. Perhaps I'm just naive enough to think we're on an upswing, where we may at least have a chance at getting to a point where the prospect of damage of the kind you mention wouldn't be laughable. This sort of progress will essentially involve, I think, broader concern for and realization of our responsibility for respecting the dignity of persons (domestic and international). My point is that a securitization-based approach would, if not carefully put forward, add to the harm you might rightly think is already being done to this possibility's chance of being realized.
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