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³ This article's vocabulary – in particular the discussion of ‘wealthy actors’ who ‘help’ to ‘alleviate poverty’ – has an unfortunate top-down and apolitical ring to it. I wish I had been able to find a more political vocabulary to concisely express the ideas presented here. But while form and content can never be entirely extricated, the argument of this essay is not intrinsically top-down: even the most democratic global poverty pluralist has to decide what to do and with whom to work, and so must address the questions discussed in this article.

⁴ According to Mason, ‘[t]he word “pluralism” generally refers to the view that there are many of the things in question (concepts, scientific world views, discourses, viewpoints etc.)’. See Elinor Mason, ‘Value Pluralism’, in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2008 Edition, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2008/entires/value-pluralism, (2006).

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⁷ If an actor has several reasons to alleviate poverty, but these reasons all point to the same (doable) activity, then actor-centred questions are of intellectual interest, but lack practical relevance.

⁸ I return to this issue in Section 4.

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⁵⁴ I thank Leif Wenar for pressing this point.

⁵⁵ I address this issue extensively elsewhere.

⁵⁶ However, as I argue in Between Samaritans and States: The Political Ethics of Humanitarian NGOs (forthcoming), donors should not treat NGOs as ‘do-gooding machines’.

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⁶⁰ My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for help on this point.

⁶¹ My discussion here is indebted to Wenar, ‘Responsibility and Severe Poverty’.

⁶² The driving example is dis-analogous to global poverty in two ways: all drivers are sometimes front drivers and sometimes rear drivers, so assigning the responsibility to rear drivers distributes the burden among all drivers. In contrast, everyone is not sometimes very poor. In addition, while one can avoid paying for a traffic accident by avoiding hitting drivers in front of oneself, because global poverty already exists, there is no way for everyone to avoid responsibility for it by being careful (except, perhaps, if one only recognizes direct causal responsibility as a moral reason to help alleviate poverty).

⁶³ Caney makes this point in terms of respect rather than fairness (see Caney, ‘Global Poverty and Human Rights’).