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Global Poverty and the Limits of Academic Expertise

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2012

Onora O'Neill
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Extract

Academics are not a natural kind. They have varied expertise and aims, and most have no expertise that is particularly relevant to problems of poverty and development. This presumably is why the essay in this issue by Thomas Pogge and Louis Cabrera—a virtual “manifesto” of the newly formed Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP)—shifts to and fro between addressing “academics” and addressing “poverty-focused academics.” Even those academics whose work touches on poverty and development—a quite small minority—are mostly expert in some but not in other aspects of these topics. Some are expert in international law, but not in economics; others know about international trade, but not about aid; some study corruption, but know nothing about nutrition—and so on. A few know a lot about normative argument, but their credentials are sketchy when it comes to empirical evidence. Many more are interested in empirical evidence, usually of a specific sort, but are uncritical of or confused about normative argument. (I suspect that many suffer from a lingering positivist hangover, which suggests that there is no intellectually respectable way to support normative claims, and indeed that this fear may lie behind the appeals to the importance of academic neutrality that Pogge and Cabrera discuss.)

Type
Academics Stand Against Poverty
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 26 , Issue 2: Academics Stand Against Poverty , Summer 2012 , pp. 183 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2012

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References

NOTES

1 Thomas Pogge and Luis Cabrera, “Outreach, Impact, Collaboration: Why Academics Should Join to Stand Against Poverty,” in this issue of Ethics & International Affairs.

2 See Keith Horton, “How Academics Can Help People Make Better Decisions Concerning Global Poverty,” in this issue of Ethics & International Affairs.

3 Benda, Julien, The Treason of the Intellectuals (Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2006 [1927])Google Scholar. Benda was critical of European intellectuals, whom he saw eschewing dispassionate analysis in favor of nationalist-informed polemic.

4 See Horton, Keith, “Aid Agencies: The Epistemic Question,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 28 (2011), pp. 29–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Horton, this issue.

5 Horton, Keith, “An Appeal to Aid Specialists,” Development Policy Review 28, no. 1 (2010), pp. 27–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 33.

6 See also Roger Riddell, “Navigating Between Extremes: Academics Helping to Eradicate Extreme Global Poverty,” in this issue of Ethics & International Affairs.

7 See in particular his website, Understanding Uncertainty, understandinguncertainty.org/.

8 See Rosling's Gapminder website at www.gapminder.org/.

9 For details, see the Global Justice Program at www.yale.edu/macmillan/globaljustice/FemPov.html.

10 Shaxson, Nicholas, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (New York: The Bodley Head, 2011)Google Scholar.

11 See O'Neill, Onora, “The Dark Side of Human Rights,” International Affairs 81, no. 2 (2005), pp. 427–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.