Focussing on people who experience poverty and on poor-led social movements: the methodology of moral philosophy, collective capabilities, and solidarity

ABSTRACT

In this commentary, I discuss three aspects of Monique Deveaux’s account. First, the method of Grounded Normative Theorizing she adopts to engage directly with the contexts and views of those experiencing poverty fits within a range of proposals to enhance the methodology of moral and political philosophy, and I would call on all philosophers working in this space to further develop these innovative methodologies. Second, Deveaux extends the capabilities approach by focusing on the group-based character of poverty and making the case for building the collective capabilities of poor-led social movements. While I do not substantially disagree with this argument (in practice), I argue that we should be careful to avoid normative collectivism (as a theoretical assumption). Finally, Deveaux discusses political solidarity with people experiencing poverty. I argue that this should be based on esteeming each other’s various contributions in more diverse ways than only in narrow economic terms. Treating people in poverty and poor-led social movements as agents of justice, as Deveaux advocates, is a significant step in this endeavour.

KEYWORDS:

• Poverty reduction
• methodology
• capabilities approach
• political solidarity
• recognition theory

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the participants at the workshop on Deveaux’s book (University of Birmingham, September 2018) for the discussions. I would like to thank Christine Koggel for editing this book symposium and for her constructive suggestions on my contribution.

Notes

1 Being much more diplomatic than I, Deveaux leaves this last part of the critique implicit.

2 They state: ‘from the start we have indicated that our project has been to try to understand what a society of greater equality may be [referring to ideal theory], and to consider what steps could bring society closer to that ideal [referring to non-ideal theory]’ (Wolff and de-Shalit 2007, 182).

3 Herzog and Zacka (2017, 763–764) rightly point out that Rawls believed that reflective equilibrium involves the moral theorist as an observer of other people’s moral conceptions and attitudes (Rawls 1975, 7). Wolff and de-Shalit (2007) and de-Shalit (2020, 17) expand Rawls’ reflective equilibrium to public reflective equilibrium – involving the public’s intuitions as well as theories. I would add the importance of an inter-/multidisciplinary approach to form a robust understanding of ‘relevant background theories’ that figure in wide reflective equilibrium (Daniels 1979), which is in line with Rawls’ (1975, 225) own brief remark that philosophers should not turn away from the inquiry into the structure of moral conceptions and of their connections with human sensibility merely because it appears to belong to psychology or social theory rather than philosophy.

4 For example, Ackerly and colleagues (2021, 11, 1) rightly criticize Wolff and de-Shalit’s methodology for focussing too much on the views of those who work with people who are disadvantaged (for example, providers of social services) rather than those who experience disadvantage. In addition, it could be objected that Wolff and de-Shalit (i) mainly relied on qualitative methods; and (ii) only investigated Israel and England.

5 In my (collaborative) work, I have mainly advocated for, and exemplified, an interdisciplinary approach to questions in climate ethics (Peeters, Bell, and Swaffield 2019; Peeters et al. 2015; Peeters, Diependaele, and Sterckx 2019). In addition, in Bell, Swaffield, and Peeters (2019), we illustrate how the application of Herzog and Zacka’s ethnographic sensibility can significantly enrich climate ethics. While the latter may be a clearer example of using an innovative methodology in philosophy, I consider the interdisciplinary approach to fit within this branch as well, because it similarly seeks to enhance normative analysis.

6 Robeyns (2005; 2017) lists further kinds of individualism, which have been the subject of a complex debate. For simplicity, I focus here only on the main distinction between normative and ontological individualism since it is the most relevant for my argument.

7 These reasons are inspired by Samuel Scheffler’s (1995) and Amartya Sen’s (2009, chapter 6) critiques of liberalism’s (and in particular Rawls’) treatment of the individual society or nation state as the unit of justification.

8 For example, OpenSecrets (a nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit research group that tracks money in USA politics) reports that ‘the 10 most generous donors and their spouses injected $1.2 billion into federal elections over the last decade’ (Evers-Hillstrom 2020, para. 6, emphasis in original). Granted, most campaign donations are done by groups, but these groups obviously do not consist of poor people. Moreover, these groups are much smaller (and are often dominated by a few extremely generous individual donors) than grassroots, pro-poor movements, while wielding much more political influence. In contrast, small-scale donations, while not insignificant, have been much more dispersed or consolidated in much larger organizations (such as trade unions).

9 Deveaux (2021, especially 201–202) also mentions political solidarity among members of poor-led movements which is a requirement for activism and collective agency. My focus here, however, is on the political solidarity across social differences because it poses some philosophical questions in which I am interested.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wouter Peeters

Wouter Peeters is Associate Professor of Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham. His main areas of research interest are climate ethics, environmental justice, intersubjective ethics and global ethics. He is lead author of the book Climate Change and Individual Responsibility: Agency, Moral Disengagement and the Motivational Gap (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).