Thomas R. Wells

There is general agreement that global poverty is an urgent moral challenge that rich countries have a particular duty to help bring to an end. Following Max Roser we argue that this challenge cannot be met without enormous and rapid economic growth. We argue further that rich country governments should deploy not only their tax revenues and geopolitical influence, but also their whole economies in this struggle. Pro-growth policies create and share opportunities and technologies crucial to poorer countries’ economic development. Finally we consider and reject the environmentalist challenge that our proposal is self-defeating because growth causes environmental damage that particularly harms the poor. Escaping from poverty is the most effective way to increase resilience to threats like climate change.

In this first issue of 2023, we are pleased to announce that Journal of Global Ethics editorial team added two new members at the beginning of 2023. Vandra Harris Agisilaou and Tom Wells joined con...

Among business ethicists, Adam Smith is widely viewed as the defender of an amoral if not anti-moral economics in which individuals’ pursuit of their private self-interest is converted by an ‘invisible hand’ into shared economic prosperity. This is often justified by reference to a select few quotations from The Wealth of Nations. We use new empirical methods to investigate what Smith actually had to say, firstly about the relationship between free market institutions and individuals’ moral virtues, and secondly about the further relationship between virtues and societal flourishing. We show with more quantitative precision than traditional scholarship that the invisible hand reading dramatically misrepresents both the nuance and the sum of Smith’s analysis. Smith paid a great deal of attention to a flourishing society’s dependence on virtues, including the non-self-regarding virtues of justice and benevolence, and he worried also about their fragility in the face of the changed incentives and social conditions of commercial society.

This paper makes the case for mandatory and negative ethical ‘warning’ labels on some goods and services, on the model of health warning labels on dangerous products like alcohol and tobacco. I first note the normative significance of the concept of consumer sovereignty for the evaluation of individual transactions and economic systems (following Craig Smith). I then argue that consumers are inadequately informed by present positive and voluntary ethical labelling systems, to the extent that they may lack the effective choice to act in line with their ethical values. I present two cases where such labelling might be appropriate: animal welfare and greenhouse gas emissions. I then consider two related objections, that labelling would be anti-democratic or coercive.

Global GDP is more than 100 trillion dollars, yet 10 % of the world’s population still live in extreme poverty on less than $1.90 per day. No one should have to live like that: alleviating poverty is a minimal moral obligation implied by nearly every secular and religious moral system. Unfortunately, neither economic growth nor conventional international aid can be relied upon to fulfil this obligation. A global basic income programme that transferred $1 per day from the rich world to each poor person would eliminate extreme poverty directly and at negligible cost. It is the least we should do.