Governments have a duty to help the world’s poorest people (and so do you!)

Pictured: the last child ever infected with naturally occurring smallpox. Since 1980, no one has contracted the disease, thanks to the foreign aid programs of governments around the world. Image attribution: CDC/ World Health Organization Stanley O. Foster M.D., M.P.H., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Let’s begin with a big question. What is the role of the state? There are many answers in political theory, but the dominant view today is some form of contractarianism. According to contractarianism the ruler (the government) derives its right to rule from an implied bargain with those who it rules (the people). According to this bargain, the government maintains security and provides various public goods. In exchange, the people pay taxes and follow the law. The world today is broadly contractarian. It is characterized by a variety of sovereign states whose governments exert almost complete authority up to their borders, and who provide a wide range of services to their people almost always including some level of economic redistribution like healthcare services or food assistance. While this approach seems intuitive to most of us, I will suggest that it is misguided. In its myopic focus on borders and the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, it misses out on one of the most important relationships that states have to individuals: the relationship between states and those that they do not rule. This relationship deserves far more attention. Idly waltzing down the default path of minimal inter-state obligations means allowing continuous, grinding poverty to remain the norm. We can do better.

There are two dramatic improvements that individuals can make to this situation. First, they can demand that their governments take the rights and needs of other nations more seriously. This would involve more generous humanitarian aid from all rich countries, and more serious attention to the provision of global public goods like climate change mitigation. A major impediment to this is the skewed ideas that many hold about foreign aid. More serious is the bone-deep attachment to contractarianism which needs to be abandoned. Second, individuals can redirect their donations and activist efforts toward neglected international causes. Some of this will involve a focus on reducing the negative impacts of foreign conflicts, but the most important issue areas will be nutrition and public health.

To put it as simply as possible: individuals should give more of their income to foreign causes and they should encourage their governments to do the same. In support of that conclusion, I want to make four arguments. First, a social contract that draws the line at borders is wrong and needlessly harmful because it underprovides global public goods and excludes far too many people from moral consideration. Second, humanitarian aid represents a tiny fraction of current budgets and even a 100% increase would have a small impact on the fiscal situation in rich countries. Third, the impact of spending money abroad, both for governments and individuals, is often much higher than spending it at home. Fourth, the upshot is that the very basis of our legal and ethical thinking needs to change.

1) The most common ideas about the social contract are wrong, intellectually and morally.

Social contract theory is extremely old and played an important role in reconceptualizing the purpose of government in the early modern world. The first modern social contract theory, from Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, was famously a defense of the absolute authority of monarchs. John Locke’s more influential formulation of the social contract was used to justify liberal government. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s version of the social contract held that government was inherently corrupting and illegitimate. All of them made a set of starting assumptions about the “state of nature” in which humans exist without a government and then reasoned about how government would come about, thereby deciding how the government was entitled to behave. This reasoning from a hypothetical is extremely shaky, and, as we will see, leads to some terrible conclusions.

A major flaw is the hypothetical “state of nature” about which very little can be said with confidence. Indeed, scholars continue to argue about whether something like a pre-government state of nature even existed in any meaningful way. It is also extremely unclear why the decisions of some distant previous generation about government structure, borders, and sovereignty should be binding on future generations. Consequently, there is wide disagreement between social contract theorists about when the people have a right to rebel, what kinds of services the government is obligated to provide, and how to set up the systems that negotiate between the ruler and the ruled.

This problematic doctrine is the basis on which the legitimacy of government is supposed to rest, and this way of thinking is baked into national constitutions and administrative apparatuses. Even the most justice oriented of the major social contract theorists, John Rawls, argued that states have minimal obligations to those outside their borders. The social contract is seen as binding only between rulers and ruled and those outside of the body politic are therefore outside of the social contract. The consequence is that borders become almost absurdly important. Accidents of birth lead to dramatic and unacceptable disparities. If the Canadian government makes no intervention in a major cholera outbreak in Vancouver, the residents of Toronto will see it as a scandal that their tax dollars were not diverted to help. But if the same cholera outbreak occurs in Kinshasha, the anemic government of the Congo is expected to deal with it. Some in Toronto may be sad about it, most will not notice, and vanishingly few will view it as a scandal.

In cases such as pandemic outbreaks this creates a state of havoc. The prevention of pandemics, as well as combatting climate change, are public goods. In economics public goods are define as goods which benefit everyone without being used up and which it is impossible to prevent people from benefiting from. Any nation that contributes to improving the climate is helping all other nations at the same time, and they cannot capture all the value of the improvements they make. If China converts entirely to green energy, the entire world benefits from the emissions reduction but only China bears the costs. Public goods like this are chronically underprovided and one of the core roles of governments, including in contractarian philosophy, is to make sure that public goods provision occurs. However, the social contract, once again, ends at borders. So, few expect, or demand, the provision of global public goods. These are extremely difficult problems to solve, but a shift in the way we think about the government will help solve them.

For normal goods, such as money or antibiotics, redistribution and government assistance in public crises are the norm within countries. However, there are minimal expectations of such measures between countries. Distance also matters. While France may feel the need to come to the aid of Belgium, it likely feels far fewer compunctions about ignoring issues in Ecuador. Social contract theorists, such as John Rawls, who argue that states have a duty to redistribute money and services to the destitute, do not ask states to redistribute outside their borders. This is especially frustrating because global inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient which shows the concentration of wealth) is higher than inequality in any single country except South Africa. Once you consider taxes and transfers, global income inequality is much higher than it is in any country, including South Africa. As it turns out, the difference between the rich and the poor in any given country is substantially smaller than the gap between the average person in a well-off country and the average person in the poorest countries in the world.

Moral concern is often extended to individuals based on whether they are either inside of the country or are understood to be citizens of it. I am not suggesting that governments should see foreigners as equal to citizens. As a practical matter this seems extremely difficult to achieve. However, a more universal conception of the role of government is necessary. There are even some versions of contractarianism that can make this possible, such as the global resources dividend proposed by Thomas Pogge which would require some amount of the proceeds from global natural resources to be spent on global ends in the poorest nations. Even a 1% consumption tax on resource use could result in $250 dollars’ worth of funding per year for each person in the world’s poorest income quintile. This may not sound like much until you realize that the world’s poorest 20% live on around $1200 a year.

Pogge’s idea is a good one, but it does not need the social contract theory to support it. All it needs is for us to embrace the very simple idea that it is good for governments to do good things for people, even if those people are not citizens of that country. That is all.

2) Rich countries can afford to spend more on aid; the current amounts are tiny.

Many envision foreign aid as a giant suck on the economy of their home country. It is an unnecessary, perhaps wasteful, expense which reduces the budget for helping their fellow citizens. Elon Musk and Donald Trump played on exactly this perception in slashing the budget of USAID, the primary United States agency responsible for humanitarian aid.

Polls have tried to establish what Americans think about the aid budget, and regardless of the exact number, it is clear that they are not familiar with the true state of things. In a University of Maryland poll, Americans estimated that their government spent an average of 18% of the budget on foreign aid. A Lous Harris poll found 28%, and a Harvard School of Public Health poll found 30%. In reality, 1.15% of the United States federal budget was spent on foreign aid in 2023. This phenomenon is not isolated to the United States. Across the OECD, people overestimated aid levels. In the United Kingdom, 87% of respondents thought that more than 1% of the budget was allocated to foreign aid, when in fact it is well below that. The level of foreign aid is overestimated on average in every OECD country, and it is rare that more than 20% of the population lowballs their estimate. When asked about the ideal amount of aid to allocate, the public in most rich countries believes that it should be higher than it is right now but lower than what they imagine it to be. By simply bringing aid in line with what people already believe is appropriate, rich countries could make an enormous impact.

3) The impact of additional spending in a developing country is huge, and the programs can be managed transparently and efficiently.

Despite all of what I’ve said above, some will still object that foreign aid is prone to corruption and unlikely to make a major impact. Both objections are untrue. First, foreign aid is some of the most impactful spending a government can engage in. Some of the greatest public heath successes of the past century have been facilitated by foreign aid. The eradication of smallpox, once one of the world’s deadliest infections, was a major international project which relied on strong fiscal commitments from the rich world. At the cost of $300 million dollars (or 0.00004% of the US federal budget), the global community eliminated a disease that had killed 500 million people in the previous century. That is an astounding return on investment. The United States-led program PEPFAR, which aims to combat AIDS has saved more than 25 million lives since 2003, at a cost of about $58 per person saved. Think about that! If your government could save the lives of citizens for only $58 per citizen, it would be negligent not to do so. The fact that the people your government can save are non-citizens should matter very little to the calculus.

Admittedly, both the eradication of smallpox and PEPFAR are uniquely cost-effective programs. However, across all programs USAID, the largest government sponsored aid agency in the world, saves about 3.3 million lives per year, at the average cost of about $1000 per life saved. That money also improves quality of life dramatically for millions more. Clean water, food, basic vaccinations, and cash-in-hand all go extremely far in nations where none of these can be taken for granted. The simple fact of the matter is that rich nations need the money they have much less than poor ones.

It is also not true that the money distributed as aid will be funneled to corrupt governments and organizations. According to the Brookings Institute, “Typically, when the U.S. wants to support a country that is ruled by a corrupt, uncooperative, or autocratic government, U.S. assistance goes through private channels—NGOs or other private entities—or multilateral organizations. Accountability of U.S. economic assistance is high—the U.S. imposes stringent, some would say onerous, reporting and accounting requirements on recipients of U.S. assistance, and the office of the U.S. inspector general (IG) investigates misuse.” While it is possible for these NGOs to be more efficient, there is very little evidence of corruption. Further, in the world where foreign aid takes up a truly meaningful portion of the budget and where citizens are actively engaged on these issues, there is every reason to believe that oversight will be higher rather than lower.

Rich individuals also need the money they have much less than poor individuals. Added to that, they have a lot of control over what charities they choose, and they can select the best. Chances are if you are reading this, you are a member of a rich nation and you are among the global wealthy. I strongly encourage you to try out the Giving What We Can calculator to get a sense for this. Knowing exactly how much is hard, but it is clear that the marginal impact of a dollar spent in Malawi is simply much higher than if that dollar had been spent in Michigan. The impact is so high that for individual donors it is remarkable cheap to improve the lives of hundreds of people. Groups like the Against Malaria Foundation (which helps prevent the spread of malaria) and Helen Keller International (which is combatting childhood blindness due to vitamin deficiency) spend efficiently. Indeed, they are so efficient, that it takes them about $3500 to save a life, and in the process, they improve conditions for hundreds more. For many it is perfectly possible to budget out enough money to save a life every year. A person with the median American income of $40,000 a year only needs to spend about 8% of their earnings to do so. If you are thirty years old, and you set aside $100 a month to donate to Helen Keller international until you are eighty years old: you will provide vitamin A supplements for around twelve-thousand children, improve their immune systems, prevent approximately fifty of those children from going blind, and save an expected twenty lives.  

Conclusion: Toward a More Just World

The way governments and individuals think about their obligations will not change radically any time soon. However, we should not reject progress just because it is imperfect. One of the mistakes of social contract theories is to assume that there is a fixed set of obligations which the state must fulfill and, having carried them out, no more is asked. The real world is not like that. Both domestically and internationally, the needs of people and the capacity to help are always changing. I envision a flexible state, willing to intervene where it can make the most difference, at home and abroad. Functionally, this should start with a commitment to the level of aid most people already feel is appropriate. As mentioned, most residents of rich countries think that 1% of the budget being allocated to aid is fair, but very few have made it to that level. In the United States the average answer is around 10% should be allocated to aid. It would also be at least a good benchmark to try and match military aid and humanitarian aid, with many countries giving more of the former than the latter. Ultimately, though the goal should be to continuously push our moral ambitions. There is no single right amount of foreign aid, just a series of effective and worthwhile projects that rich nations should continue to prioritize. The same goes for individuals. The right amount of donation and giving tends to be just a bit more than you are giving now, and a continuous reassessment over time about what you can afford to give.

It boils down to this: it is ridiculous to talk about just government unless we consider the needs of the poor world. The primary author of the Indian constitution, BR Ambedkar once said that the village community was “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism.” I worry that the nation, too, operates in this way. It is time to shrug off the legacy of nation-state focused thinking which makes us blind to the needs of people outside our community. There are reasons to be patriotic and proud of one’s country, just as there are reasons to love the life of one’s village, town or city. However, patriotism becomes narrow-minded ignorance, if in our myopia, and backed up by flimsy philosophical notions of the social contract, we are prevented from seeing and responding to the needs of the vast majority of our fellow global citizens.

By Sam Peterson