Two views of assistance

1 Why the relief view is morally unattractive

The first problem of the relief view is that it is based on an underlying moral asymmetry between donors and recipients. Second and relatedly, the relief view downplays the importance of recipients’ voice in the assistance relationship. Third, the relief view accepts a deeply simplistic account of the basic interests of recipients.

In order to sharpen these points, let us go back to what we have called the relief view of assistance and more specifically let us focus on proposition 3. The first feature of this view of assistance is that the latter seems to presuppose the fact that donors and recipients stand in what we can call strongly asymmetrical positions. In other words, borrowing the expressions from Amartya Sen (1999) and David Miller (2007), donors are mainly seen as the agents in the standard picture of assistance, while recipients are mainly seen as patients or passive receivers. ⁹ In Singer’s case, this could not be more apparent. His metaphor is of a drowning child. Undoubtedly, Singer employed the use of a child to maximize our sense of obligation. But using a child as an example also implies that the recipient of aid is not a full agent. Children are not taken to be responsible moral agents in the way that adults are. They are, for the most part, moral patients. Even if one holds the position that the recipients of aid are in an unjust situation not of their own making, and external assistance is necessary, one can still argue that they have claims on our assistance without claiming that they are the moral equivalent of a child. This is, per se, a striking picture. Notice that this is congruent with charities depicting needy children in their calls for donations, and youth-oriented charities receiving more donations than general-purpose aid organizations.

The asymmetry between donors and recipients of international assistance in the relief conception is further characterized by two features that explain why we should be uncomfortable with it from a moral point of view. First, it seems to suggest that the idea of responsibility, a central notion within much of contemporary liberal political philosophy, is basically out of place when we think about assistance. Note how this is an assumption that has widespread implications. For example, it suggests that it is difficult even to think about the role that responsibility can play when we consider the condition of the global poor, and, most importantly, when undertaking the correct steps to relieve it or eradicate it. At face value, this may seem an obviously sound statement. To simply blame the global poor for their own condition will (correctly) strike many as callous.

Yet, the underlying preoccupation with responsibility need not be confined to the attribution of blame. While the very idea of a moral agent is closely related to the concept of moral responsibility (see note 11), there is no need to equate responsibility and blame. That is not the only role we assign to the idea of responsibility in moral and political philosophy. To see an agent as even only potentially responsible for the condition in which she finds herself affects both the conception we have of her and that she has of herself. For example, it suggests that she is capable of taking responsibility for her situation once certain specified background conditions obtain. To see someone as being able to take responsibility for her condition is to assign an agential role to her. It means to see the person in question not as a passive receiver of her fate, but as an active participant in the creation of her future; as someone who will affect the way in which her life will unfold over time. Moreover, seeing an agent as being able to take responsibility for her condition is to assign a special kind of dignity to her choices, the dignity that is the outcome of one’s ability to reflectively endorse one’s ends and commitments. Finally, to be seen as and treated as if one were capable of taking responsibility is also a way for individuals to enhance their sense of pride and self-respect. Put simply, in denying recipients of assistance the capability of taking responsibility for their condition, we deny them full moral status.

Second, the asymmetric relationship between donors and recipients downplays the relevance of recipients’ voice and participatory role in the assistance process. The donor identifies a deficiency for some population and then provides material resources to overcome the deficiency. This approach is quite standard – virtually all major donors, whether they are countries, foundations, or large international NGOs like UNICEF, the Red Cross or the World Bank have historically relied on this approach to aid. This is also, we believe, the standard way that aid is conceptualized by laypeople and in the global justice literature. However, this approach is, we argue, deeply problematic from a moral point of view. It provides a narrative in which the global poor are effectively depicted as carriers of a condition rather than agents confronted with a problem. That someone needs help does not mean that she is unable to contribute to improving her own situation.

The relief view most naturally suggests a conception of recipients as patients in an almost literal sense. The provider/sender tries to relieve the suffering and pain that the patient/receiver is going through. What really speaks for the receiver/patient here is his condition and the needs and pains that require to be addressed and relieved. The metaphor of the patient is not at all innocent. The patient is not simply passive because the cure comes from the doctor, he is also passive because the doctor can establish the source of his condition and relieve it without finding the patient’s input as decisive or necessary. The recipient population on this model simply is the stand-in for a particular type of disease. Donors then ‘treat the disease’ by attempting to relieve the deprivation. On this approach, the wants, interests and cultural context of the recipients are not brought to the fore – as passive recipients, they do not get considered as agents who may understand their situation differently from the donors. The recipient/patient is merely the carrier of a set of problems, rather than an agent with his own priorities and understanding of his situation. ¹⁰

Finally, note how propositions 4 and 5 of the relief view rely on a very specific, and in our view very narrow, account of recipients’ basic interests. The picture seems one that is strongly biased in favor of what we can roughly define as basic physical needs. There is no denying that those who are starving and fall victim to illness and various forms of deprivation are first and foremost in need of very specific forms of relief geared to address the most immediate set of physical needs with which they are confronted. Life without water, food, shelter and basic medicines simply does not last very long. However, while priority is, in some circumstances, justified, giving priority does not excuse one from the broader task of situating these broadly physical needs in a wider account of what such basic interests are and thus what it means to promote them. ¹¹ For example, one could see such needs as part of a view of basic interests based on the satisfaction of individual preferences. Or, alternatively, one could see them as part of an account of basic human capabilities. Finally, one could see these basic interests as part of and precondition for the successful ability to participate in political life and to contribute, together with other members of one’s community, to the political self-determination/collective autonomy of one’s people both within and outside one’s borders.

What is crucial here is that which picture of recipients’ basic interests we want to assume is bound to affect the kind of purposes we will attach to the assistance we provide and thus will affect, normatively, the very ways in which we decide to carry out our obligations to aid those who are in need. If we perceive the problem facing the global poor as a lack of water or medicines, then providing water or medicines solves the problem. If we perceive the problem of the poor as being unable to engage in collective self-determination, or individually develop a plan of life, then the solution to the problem is rather more complex. In the same way, seeing individual interests as strongly related to the wide array of social, cultural and political values that most individuals care about is bound to affect the types of means that we deem appropriate to discharge our duties by stressing the role of local input and political priorities. ¹²

This is not merely a theoretical point. Consider a recent high-profile example: the PlayPump. The PlayPump was meant to be an innovative technological solution to the problem of water availability. Hailed by multiple prominent aid organizations and a variety of celebrities, it was a merry-go-round that would use the work generated by the spinning to pump ground water into a basin. It had great intentions – it gave children a new toy, and was supposed to reduce the time mothers spent pumping water. It was also a total failure. Connecting the merry-go-ground to a pump meant that it was much harder for children to spin it, so it was not a good toy for them. On top of that, it then turned playtime into work time for children, which can create the idea that development agencies endorse the concept of child labor. When mothers tried to pump water, they were essentially using a vastly inferior pump, which increased the time it took them to get water for their family. Outside agents, looking to relieve people of a burden, in fact increased their burdens by failing to actually engage with the recipients as agents. PlayPumps had to be removed and replaced with normal pumps. A great deal of time and money was spent making people’s lives harder, not easier, as a result of taking the relief view to assistance.

2 Why the relief view is empirically implausible

Now consider propositions 3 and 6 in the relief view. The relief view, we have claimed, is deeply implausible. It is implausible because, simply put, it suggests a view of poverty as a problem that can be fixed in the short term. Furthermore, it often tends to depict it as the result of natural events or brute bad luck instead of seeing its roots in social and political factors.

To begin with, the relief view suggests a conception of poverty as a short-term problem that can be literally ‘fixed’ by transferring resources or relevant goods to recipients. This picture is, in our view, deeply implausible (see Sen and Dreze, 1989; Wenar, 2007, 2011). The relief view imagines that poverty is an issue of what economists refer to as stocks, rather than flows. The particular level of material endowment at the present moment is the problem, not the productive capacity of the population through time. As a result, while short-term deprivation may be addressed, little is done to improve future states.

This problem is relatively easy to illustrate. For instance, building a well or water pump may allow for easier access to clean water in the present moment, but that does not ensure future access to water. If the well or pump breaks, and there is not local knowledge of how to repair it, it will go unused. ¹³ Similarly, providing clean water at the source does not ensure clean water at the point of use – dirty hands, dirty water jugs and dirty dishes can all conspire to carry dangerous water-borne diseases that can contaminate water, even if it was clean at the source (Ahuja, Kremer and Zwane, 2010; Kremer, Leino, Miguel and Zwane, 2011).

Alternatively, consider food aid. The latter appears to be the simplest of all of these cases. When people need food, a very reasonable impulse would be to feed them. However, while food aid works well in the short run, and in the medium or long run, the assistance can make it more difficult for the recipient population to sustainably feed itself. In particular, food aid can often drive local farmers out of business, as it is hard to compete with a free product. Once the food aid ends, there is no (or at least degraded) internal capacity to replace that food aid with local production. Food relief, though obviously delivered with the best possible intentions, can reduce the productive capacity of the population by forcing farmers to compete with free food. This can serve to increase poverty, rather than alleviate it (Levinsohn and McMillan, 2007; Barrett and Maxwell, 2007). ¹⁴

Perhaps even more worryingly, the relief view suggests a depiction of poverty as a form of natural occurrence. It equates destitution to the result of some form of brute luck rather than, as it surely is, the result of economic, political and historical processes. Poverty and destitution are emphatically not like a tornado or like a storm – they do not strike unpredicted and unannounced. People can be easily misled to see things in this light. It is just one more instance of confusing what is natural with what is deeply artificial. To see how, we suggest the following thought experiment: for each of the relief efforts that you are exposed to in the media and/or in the philosophical literature, ask yourself the following question, namely, ‘How did we get to this problem?’ Lack of access to sanitation, food and basic medicines means lack of access to the appropriate institutional context that will provide them. Absolute material scarcity, as Sen and Dreze have taught us (1989), is almost never the problem.

Even in the most extreme circumstances, such as natural disasters, institutional conditions are all-important. To illustrate, consider flooding. If a large flood kills several thousand people, is this just a matter of luck? The answer, most of the time, is ‘No’. The choice to build one’s dwellings in an area that is (almost always ex-ante) known to be subject to flooding is a conscious one that the authorities have allowed because they did not know how (or were unwilling) to satisfy the housing needs of the population. In the introduction we have touched upon the example of an earthquake taking place in two different locations. We can extend and generalize the message conveyed by that example. When it comes to most natural disasters, being poor and being unlucky are one and the same thing because poverty simply pushes the poor to accept risks that most citizens of developed countries are not required to run. ¹⁵ These risks are allowed to exist due to prevailing social, economic and political circumstances in a given context. Natural disasters can cause large-scale human misery only if (deeply artificial) enabling conditions obtain. This is of course not limited to the developing world. Hurricane Katrina exposed a number of institutional failures in New Orleans. Not only had the physical infrastructure in the form of levees been inadequately designed and maintained, but also the worst damage was found in poorer areas of the city, because the poor lived on lower ground than the wealthy. ¹⁶

Finally, it should also be stressed that in all the aforementioned examples we have assumed that the resources that are employed for aid effectively reach the recipients they were intended to reach. This is, at least in the real world, where most aid is conducted in situations of conflict and political instability, an implausible assumption. Transferring resources in situations of social and political instability is usually a good recipe for, at best, inefficiency, and, at worst, aggravating the problem by financing those who are responsible for the very instability that has created material deprivation. The iron law of political economy is: in the absence of strong institutions, resources flow to the most powerful actors (see Wenar, 2007). A clear corollary is that they do not flow to the ones who are most in need. Donors ignore such law at their own (moral) risk and at recipients’ (tangible) cost. Not ignoring it certainly reinforces the commitment to think about the institutional context in which poverty is created and assistance is delivered. This observation should also explain why those who are sympathetic to the relief view cannot simply maintain that immediate relief can be understood as the initial part of a wider development effort. Without seeing the problems and the circumstances of the global poor through the lenses of what we will call the development view it is simply impossible to appreciate the substantial risk of doing harm that is connected to the relief perspective. ¹⁷ Within the field of international assistance this type of concern is particularly pressing given that the local institutional structures that we are bound to take for granted if we accept the relief view are precisely the ones that directly harm recipients and often explain their need for outside help.

3 Why the relief view is structurally incomplete

In part I we have also claimed that the relief view is (structurally) incomplete. To see why, note how the relief view is clearly at odds with the wider empirical trends that we can observe in international society. The picture of assistance provided by the relief view taken as a whole is closest to what we may classify as humanitarian aid. As Thomas Weiss (2013) has recently documented, humanitarian aid has gone through a rather phenomenal phase of growth. Both the flow of resources and the sheer number of organizations that are committed to humanitarian aid in contexts riddled with conflict and deprivation have grown substantially. Humanitarianism is now a significant industry, going from a cash flow of just a few billion dollars in the 1990s to a whopping 18 billion dollars in 2011 (Weiss, 2013: 7). One might thus be excused for believing that this is the main form that assistance takes at the international level. However, the numbers collected by various international organizations and more research-focused NGOs paint a dramatically different picture. In the real world, there are roughly 6 dollars spent on long-term development for each dollar spent on humanitarian aid (Global Humanitarian Assistance Report, 2014).

Yet, the relief view of assistance is bound to be silent on these issues. For example, why are so many resources spent on large infrastructure programs? Why are so many resources dedicated to train members of central bank and treasury departments in developing countries? What should be the priorities when it comes to these spending decisions and how we decide to allocate funds? The relief view largely fails to engage with the most important component of international assistance, which is itself a reason to look for alternatives. To borrow David Crocker’s expression (2008), the relief view simply lacks a ‘development ethic’.

1 Basic features of the development view

As we have seen in part II there are several important reasons to reject the relief view. In what follows we try to sketch an alternative that takes the global poor’s agential role seriously, and examines their problems more plausibly. Given the space we have available, providing a full-blown account of such an alternative would be impossible. ¹⁸ However, we do want to make a suggestion about the nature of the alternative and about how to construct an initial framework for its justification. The heart of what we take to be the most plausible alternative to the relief view is to conceive international assistance as a form of support to development. The features of the view we articulate are in part driven by what we take to be wrong about the relief picture. In our view, the correct understanding of international assistance is characterized by the following propositions:

Proposition 1*: the overarching political goal of international assistance is to enhance the prospects for the creation of well-functioning and at least decent ¹⁹ local institutions that are necessary for persons to adequately sustain themselves in perpetuity; ²⁰

Before moving on to the issue of justification, we want to clarify some of the basic aspects of the development view. The development view can be considered as a generalization and elaboration of what Sen famously called an ‘agent-oriented’ (1999: 11) perspective on development. ²² These views share the basic features of what we have called the development view. They recognize the centrality of recipients’ agency, the multifaceted nature of their basic interests, and the complexity of the enabling conditions that need to be addressed in order to affect the prospects for poverty eradication. All the aforementioned components are susceptible of being understood and justified in different ways. To illustrate, a concern for agency can be given a Kantian grounding (e.g. as part of an ideal of autonomy), a Millean grounding (e.g. as a view concerning the institutional preconditions for cultivating individuality), or, following Nussbaum, a more Aristotelian one (e.g. as part of a picture of human flourishing), or, accepting political liberals’ worry about comprehensive doctrines, it could be seen as a constitutive part of the ideal of membership in a well-ordered political society. In the same way, basic interests can be understood as well-being, but also, following a more Rawlsian root, as the exercise of certain moral powers. Finally, the nature of the enabling conditions that one can choose to highlight ranges from the workings of the international economic institutions to the basic norms of the international system and the quality of local (formal and informal) institutional and cultural structures (or any ‘weighted’ combination of these factors). In what follows we offer an initial articulation of the development view.

As stressed by propositions 1* and 2*, the development view is geared to reflect a much wider concern for the institution-building aspects of international assistance. The emphasis on institution-building and institutional capacity is grounded in an interest in promoting the individual agency of recipients, while at the same time accepting the enabling role that institutions play for allowing the latter to be stably achieved. Moreover, propositions 2* and 6* express the fact that to accept the development view is to accept that our commitment to international assistance is a long-term enterprise: there are no short fixes, no resources that can be magically transferred to end the problem. Building institutions is almost never a short-term endeavor. Nor is it the case that poverty is the same everywhere – different institutional environments shape both the causes and effects of poverty.

Proposition 3* of the development view also reflects the fact that it is aimed at being more participatory than the relief view. It sees recipients as first and foremost agents that need to be active participants in the assistance process. The development perspective takes as its central goal the recipient’s ability to provide for her own needs independently and without the continued need to rely on outside help. In the development view, assistance providers and assistance recipients are seen as co-generators of solutions, and their relationship is one of basic equality in terms of decision-making authority and power to influence and orient the specific purposes of assistance. Thus the development view requires the ability for recipients to have a strong form of voice in, for example, setting priorities in terms of where and for what purposes assistance should be directed. Put differently, the assistance relationship needs to be seen as a partnership. There are no patients or victims within it, but different sets of agents facing different circumstances, with different sources of knowledge.

Moreover, it is important to stress that the development view also pays attention to how recipients (especially collectives) integrate with the international system (this is made clear by proposition 2*). In fact, integration with the international system, emphasis on institutional capacity, and increased agency for recipients are all intimately related in several important circumstances that characterize the global economic and political order. To illustrate, think about the so-called resource curse (here we follow Wenar, 2008). The latter is made possible by the fact that in international society, at least for what concerns the ownership of natural resources, might makes right: those who control a territory, independently of how such control is achieved or perpetuated, can legally sell the natural resources of the territory. Over time, this kind of institutional rule has increased the outburst of civil conflicts, of authoritarian regimes, and lowered the economic prospects of those who are affected. The resource curse is a clear case where the international system contributes to the destruction of local institutional capacity. In this picture, the first imperative for those who are committed to the development view is to remove these incentives, and to effectively stop the process by which rich countries contribute to the resource curse. Removing this type of obstacle is often the main part of the initial effort to allow local political movements to start a process of institution-building that is driven by local priorities and reflects their agency.

The role of international and global governance institutions and how the development view addresses the impact of such institutional processes is something we are keen to emphasize. Doing so will allow us to dispel a potential misinterpretation of the conception of international assistance we are putting forward. It is a truism that we live in an increasingly globalized world (Held, 2010). A slightly more specific way to capture the meaning of the aforementioned proposition is to look at the explosion in the numbers of international and global governance institutions (see Hale and Held, 2011), their growing impact on the daily lives of persons around the world, and their growing reach within domains of social, political and economic cooperation that were previously thought of as the purview of domestic authority and jurisdiction (see Buchanan, 2013: ch. 6). The emphasis that the development view puts on the quality of domestic governance may suggest, for example, that we discount the pervasive effects of globalization on a country’s ability to successfully integrate in the world economy.

We deny that. In order to provide a reply, here is a brief comment on the background empirical assumptions we are making. We can conceptualize the role to attribute to international and global governance institutions in debates about the origins of a country’s prospect for development as a continuum between two boundary points: we can call these ‘explanatory nationalism’ and ‘explanatory globalism’ (see Cohen, 2010). It is fair to say that few would want to position themselves on one of these boundary points (see Rodrik, 2008; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012: 45 ff. for extensive empirical discussions). To do so, to believe in either ‘explanatory nationalism’ or ‘explanatory globalism’, is implausible and would suggest a black-and-white picture of the global institutional landscape. Thus, the development view occupies a point on the continuum between the two aforementioned options. Put differently, the development view builds on a certain conception of the background circumstances that affect the prospect for successful assistance. Such background should not be interpreted as a specific set of propositions. Rather, it should be seen as a conceptual space – one in which the quality of domestic, international and transnational institutions interacts, often in very complex ways, to determine the likelihood that the goals of international assistance will be met.

Finally, while it is tempting when faced with extreme deprivation and suffering to reduce our concern for the poor to basic physical needs, propositions 4* and 5* of the development view urge us to recognize the wider spectrum of basic human interests. In our characterization we have emphasized the importance of the social and political dimension of such interests, as a corrective compared with the relief view. An individual facing severe and continued material scarcity is alone in her misery and need. She is isolated from the rest of the world, almost a prisoner in her body. There is no doubt that no one should experience that type of condition. Yet, at the same time, it is precisely by acknowledging the wider set of basic interests that all individuals do have that we most effectively highlight the inhumane character of those circumstances.

2 Justifying the development view

But this still leaves open the ‘why’ question. Why should we gear assistance toward the development perspective? In what follows we provide 7 reasons that we take to be central to the justification of the development view. Beyond their substantive content, what is relevant about these reasons is that they offer a justificatory framework that does not rely on a specific philosophical perspective. Instead the framework we offer in favor of the development view can be portrayed as a set of ‘public reasons’ whose grounding, relative priority and strength can be interpreted differently. Proceeding this way will allow us to de-couple the justification of the development view from Sen’s and Nussbaum’s capability approach and thus widen its appeal.

Before moving on to explain the reasons that support the development view, we would like to comment on their nature and on the structure of the justificatory framework they help to create. To begin with, it is important to emphasize that the reasons we provide below are public in nature. They constitute, in our view, elements of an ideal of global public reason. In the Rawlsian sense of the expression, reasons are public insofar as they do not presuppose the acceptance of a specific comprehensive doctrine (Rawls, 1996). Instead, they are reasons that all can accept as free and equal citizens. Broadly speaking, some form of commitment to the idea of public reason can be traced back to the work of authors such as Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, but also Habermas and Gaus, among others. The main insight, following Jonathan Quong (2013), is that moral and political rules that structure a given system of institutions should be acceptable (at a suitable level of idealization) to those who live under them.

However, clearly, the development view is not a system of rules, nor is it a constitutional essential of a liberal democratic polity. So, in what sense are the reasons that justify the development view public in nature? The basic idea is that the principles that should regulate international assistance in a society of peoples should be based on a justificatory framework that is acceptable to all its members in good standing. We should be able to justify a view of international assistance in such a way that the roles of donors and recipients are basically interchangeable and thus that the reasons that support a specific conception of assistance are acceptable from the standpoint of both roles. In the same way, we should be able to justify a view of assistance so that, within the bounds of toleration, ²³ such conception does not presuppose adherence to a specific form of political tradition.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of correctly locating a conception of international assistance. Some of the staunchest critics of international aid maintain that it is the perpetuation of a paternalistic and/or imperialistic set of practices in which donors (mainly western countries) impose a view of the (political) good life on recipients (mainly from non-western developing countries) (see Baker, 2016; Baaz, 2005; Young, 2003). Locating a conception of international aid within global public reason tries to defuse these concerns. It attempts to make international assistance less exclusionary, more sensitive to the concerns of recipients, and less bent on univocally dictating the correct path to become a well-ordered people.

Here are two comments about the structure of the reasons we provide below. These reasons are to be understood as a framework with three mutually supporting tiers. The first tier is composed of the first two reasons we put forward (namely, a commitment to long-term effects of aid policies and the relationship with intergenerational fairness). We can conceive of the first tier as the kind of reasons that are strictly speaking external to the idea of international assistance but might bear on the desirability of a specific conception. Thinking about the first tier of reasons is important to reach a wider form of reflective equilibrium by asking whether the development view is consistent with some of our considered convictions that go beyond the realm of international assistance. The second tier is composed of reasons 3, 4 and 5 (namely, the epistemic advantages of the development view, its attractiveness in light of a commitment to partial self-reliance, and its more credible account of the basic interests of individuals). The second tier of reasons should be seen as the core of the justificatory framework for the development view. It concerns the nature of the assistance relationship and how we should conceive of recipients and of their interests and predicament in a way that they could reasonably endorse from within their own framework of reasons. The third tier is composed of reasons 6 and 7 (namely, the effects of adopting the development view for responsible international citizenship and reduce international domination). Third-tier reasons speak to the place of a conception of international assistance in the broader conceptual space provided by the ideal of a moderately just international order.

It is also important to point out that the list of reasons that we put forward is not meant to be exhaustive. What we provide is a justificatory framework, not a final justification for the development view. The fact that we are not providing a final justification for the development view is not, however, something that should detract from the attractiveness of the line of argument suggested by this article. To the contrary, we believe that the framework we have constructed has generative potential that goes beyond the distinct reasons we put forward. This can be gleaned from the structure of the framework as we have discussed it above. What the structure suggests is that a justification for the development view of international assistance can rely on reasons that are external to the assistance relationship, reasons that pertain to the nature of the assistance relationship itself, and, finally, reasons that describe the place of international assistance in the ideal of a just international order. Thinking about the justification of the development view through the lenses of these three different kinds of reasons can help us generate more reasons to support it and implicitly provides some guidance on how to do so.

Let us begin with what we have called first-tier reasons. Consider what motivates the very idea of international assistance. Let us assume, as both the relief view and the development view assume, that our duties of assistance are justified by some form of concern for the basic interests, however defined, of those we intend to help. It is a basic principle of rationality that one should, all other things being equal, favor options that can satisfy more rather than fewer of our preferences or ends.

Applying this simple counting principle of rationality to assistance, with the addition of what we believe are relatively solid empirical regularities, reveals the superiority of the development perspective. If assistance is justified in terms of the basic interests of the recipients, then, we must be committed to the protection of their basic interests not just today, but also tomorrow, the next day and for the foreseeable future. However, there seems to be no reliable way to make sure that our contribution to the protection of the basic interests of those we are helping can be sustained in the foreseeable future unless we help recipients to develop their own institutional capacity to protect their basic interests. The ability of a society to protect the basic interests of its members depends on the types of institutions, both formal and informal, available to those members. As we have argued above, poverty is not simply a matter of short-term problems dictated by material scarcity. Rather, it is almost always the case that such poverty is the outcome of institutional shortcomings. To ensure reliable protection of basic interests of a population in perpetuity thus requires addressing the root causes of such institutional shortcomings.

The latter idea is also relevant when it comes to concerns with generational fairness. Adopting the development perspective allows us to take a long-term view of the problem of global poverty. The goal, as we have been arguing, is to try to address the problem of global poverty looking at its roots and with a view that each person and society becomes self-reliant in perpetuity. This entails giving more attention from a moral point of view to what happens to future generations. Shifting resources from relief to development, even at some human cost, can be important in order to provide future generations with a better institutional context than the one that present generations in a poor country have to deal with. It is, in other words, one way of thinking about intergenerational equity by taking it seriously where it matters most. In the intergenerational justice literature, concerns are often expressed with respect to what kind of duties we have to those who come after us. We believe that no matter the strength of our obligations, there is no denying that trying to foster well-ordered institutions is something that goes in the right direction. ²⁴

Now consider what we have called second-tier reasons, namely, reasons that concern the nature of the assistance relationship. The development of local institutions is central to gain what we can call epistemic advantages. ²⁵ Indeed this is one of the main findings of the literature on participatory development, and that provides one of the most important justifications for the Participatory Poverty Assessments championed by institutions such as the World Bank. Local institutions are usually much more apt, all other things being equal, to gather the required information to ascertain the very content of people’s basic interests or at least to better determine, given local circumstances, how to best protect the basic interests of persons. It is important to stress that this is not a commitment to some form of soft cultural relativism. Even if we were to believe that basic interests of persons are invariant with respect to social setting, we would still need to pay attention to levels of development and social, economic and political circumstances in order to operationalize these interests in institutional practices, and determine the relevant trade-offs between different basic interests. Even if everyone has the same basic interests, how those interests are expressed and understood are quite different across a number of cultural contexts. Part of respecting people’s agency is engaging them on their own terms. Of course, the reliance on local knowledge, while certainly superior from an epistemic perspective, also implies certain trade-offs, for example, in terms of accountability (see, for example, Mohan and Stokke, 2000). However, while we do not wish to deny the existence of trade-offs, we still want to suggest that the epistemic advantage should not be discounted given the complexity of development efforts.

Furthermore, all other things being equal, we can conjecture that those who receive our help would rather be able to be self-reliant. The ability to be partly in control of or responsible for one’s condition is a central aspect of individual self-respect. This is something we have already emphasized when describing the shortcomings of the relief view. While cooperation and mutual dependence are a fact of life in all human societies, all other things being equal, it is not implausible to claim that a state of affairs in which individuals believe that they are making a substantive contribution to the protection of their own basic interests is superior to its alternatives. This is, in our view, one way to understand the relevance of economic liberties as championed by market-friendly approaches such as the one recently put forward by John Tomasi (2013). The goal is not simply to help those in need, but to allow them to help themselves and for them to be able to understand their efforts as something that has an impact on their lives.

In the same way, there are matters that pertain to the very specification of the basic interests of those whom we have a duty to help. ²⁶ As we have argued above, there is often a tendency to look at the justification of aid only through the lenses of need and/or basic welfare and then to provide a definition of the content of these terms which tend to be closely associated with the satisfaction or improvement of persons’ physical/bodily condition. However, both what we take to be persons’ needs and what informs their welfare cannot be taken to be determined by their physical condition. It is an unjustifiably reductionist view of such terms to see them as determined merely by physical functions.

For example, it is widely acknowledged that persons’ basic interests reflect a wide array of goods. Famously, Rawls (1971) claimed that the social bases of self-respect are the most important among the primary goods that those who participate in social cooperation would want to distribute fairly. In the same way, authors like Kymlicka (1996) have relentlessly argued that culture can be central to an individual’s ability to lead an autonomous life insofar as it provides context and meaning to his choices. In the same way, liberal nationalists like David Miller (1995, 2007) and Yael Tamir (1993) see national belonging as a key aspect of individuals’ self-conception and as an important instrumental component of the possibility to sustain just social institutions. Finally, think of Nussbaum’s (2000, 2011; Nussbaum and Sen, 1993) and Sen’s (1989, 1999) work and the plurality and heterogeneity of the capabilities and functionings that are seen as necessary to lead decent fully human lives. This is crucial to understand a central reason to favor the development view over the relief view. The relief view oversimplifies the conception of the basic interests of those we are trying to help. Rather than seeing people as carriers of deprivation, the development view understands people as agents who wish to carry out their own plan of life. Once we accept the latter picture, confining the understanding of the poor’s interests to physical needs becomes untenable.

It is important to note that all these ‘wider’ views of basic interests have something in common: they see individuals’ basic interests as partly defined by their participation in social life. This is an aspect of the goals of assistance that needs to be stressed. If the goal of assistance is to restore individuals’ ability to lead decent lives, lives in which their basic interests are secured/protected, then we need to acknowledge that it is important to cater to this wider view of human interests that incorporates persons’ social, cultural and political relationships. Yet, if we adopt the relief view, we simply seem unable to fully appreciate the social, cultural and political components of individuals’ basic interests.

Finally, consider what we have called third-tier reasons. The development view allows us to connect the concern for assistance with the concern for responsible international citizenship. It must be noted that when we help individuals through assistance we also, in the long term, hope to allow them to integrate in international society. This seems to be Rawls’ view when he articulates his duty of assistance in The Law of Peoples (1999). According to Rawls the duty is meant to address what he sees as societies facing unfavorable circumstances. To discharge the duty means effectively to help the society in question to transition to the status of being well-ordered. A well-ordered political society, Rawls calls them ‘peoples’, is able to endorse for the right reasons a fair law of peoples and thus is able to respect other well-ordered political societies as members of the society of well-ordered peoples. According to Rawls this is a crucial step towards the elimination of what he calls the great evils of human history, which include political injustice and war. This is one way to see why the view of assistance as development is able to create important positive externalities and achieve goods that are strictly speaking ‘external’ to the assistance relationship itself. The creation of positive externalities is to be coupled with the possible preventive action against negative externalities such as the emergence of failed states. Failed states are certainly first and foremost a tragedy for their own citizens. However, it is easy to see that they also pose a political problem for the international system. They undermine international stability by creating refugees and large lawless territories that often harbour criminal and terroristic activities (see Krasner, 2004).

Finally, the development view is congruent with several commentators’ focus on what we can define as the problem of international domination (see Laborde and Ronzoni, 2015; Pettit, 2014, 2010; Fearon and Laitin, 2004). The latter is, roughly understood, determined by the great power imbalances in international society. Such power imbalances determine different bargaining positions in international economic and political organizations that severely constrain the ability of many developing countries to be properly in control of the rules and regimes that deeply affect them. The development view is essential here both to recognize the urgency of this concern and to try more effectively to address it. If we take the development view of international assistance, our goal is to build local institutional capacity. If successful, the development of local institutional capacity can make developing countries less dependent on foreign donors in the long term. The diminished dependence on foreign aid donors is crucial to achieve two outcomes that indirectly diminish the concern for international domination. First, it would increase the resilience of developing countries and their ability to withstand changes to the rules governing the global economy. Second, it deprives developed countries of one of the main tools through which superior bargaining power is exercised, namely, through the threat of stopping economic aid (see Moss, Pettersson and van de Walle, 2006).