Pluralism about Global Poverty

Theorists have identified a wide range of reasons why individual and collective actors have a moral responsibility to help alleviate global poverty. There is now widespread agreement that several of these reasons are valid. From the perspective of the poverty opponent, it might seem that the more reasons there are to alleviate poverty, the better. The difficulty is that different reasons for alleviating poverty point to different poverty-alleviating activities. This situation generates questions about both how actors should set priorities among different poverty-alleviating activities (‘actor-centred’ questions) and who should have primary responsibility for alleviating particular cases of poverty (‘case-centred’ questions). This article explains why actor-centred and case-centred questions are worth asking and sketches a promising way of responding to them.