New paper: Cosmopolitan sentiment - Politics, charity, and global poverty
How do we provide effective long-term solutions to worldwide poverty? Dr Joshua Hobbs's latest article is now available to read via Res Publica.
“Duties to address global poverty face a motivation gap. We have good reasons for acting yet we do not, at least consistently,” states Dr Joshua Hobbs, Lecturer and Consultant in Applied Ethics.
“A ‘sentimental education’, featuring literature and journalism detailing the lives of distant others has been suggested as a promising means by which to close this gap.”
“Although sympathetic to this project, I argue that it is too heavily wed to a charitable model of our duties to address global poverty — understood as requiring we sacrifice a certain portion of our income. However, political action, aimed at altering institutions at both a global and a local level is likely to be necessary in order to provide effective long-term solutions to poverty globally. To rectify this, the article develops an alternative dialogical account of sentimental education, suitable for motivating support for political action to address global poverty.”
