Professor Abigail Gosselin

About the Speaker: (University of Colorado - Boulder)

"Casual Considerations and Responsibility for Global Poverty"
Abstract: If global poverty is understood as having structural causes of an economic and political nature, then it seems that some causal concerns should be relevant to assessing responsibility for it. Causal models of moral responsibility require that an agent make a morally relevant causal contribution to harm through her intentions and actions, so that both causal connection and fault are established; assessments of liability, blame, and punishment operate on this model. Despite the apparent relevance of causation to structural problems like poverty, some social and political philosophers object that causal considerations present misguided ways to think about responsibility for global poverty. This paper defends the relevance of three features of causal responsibility that are essential to conceptualizing the responsibility for global poverty, even and especially when the problem is understood as a structural one requiring collective action.

Friday, October 22, 2004 at 5:10 p.m. in Hoyt Hall, Room 215