An article in Harper’s says that “Westerners bear a moral responsibility to help less well-off people living in other countries.” This sounds very nice but some crucial questions arise immediately. Help them to do what? What are the acceptable formats of the help and who should determine them? Should any strings to be attached? And, not the least important, once we have chosen to make morality part of the equation, whose morality are we relying on.
The point of the article is to show that the attempts to promote respect for human rights internationally have failed. That is not surprising given the vagueness of the language used to discuss the issue.
Clarissa's Blog 
It seems to me that if you want to help effectively, you have to help because you want to, not because you are compelled to by some abstracted “moral responsibility”. If people had their humanity,they would need not injunctions.
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If you actually bother to ask them, I think there are fewer things that many a non-westerner sees with as much apprehension and anxiety as a Westerner’s “help”.
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I wish my country were at the advanced stage of nation-building to publish such articles.
As an Israeli, I immediately thought about less well-off people in Muslim countries around us. Naturally, I don’t see helping them as my moral responsibility.
The first responsibility is to protect oneself, the second – trying to minimize harm one does to others. And I am not sure Westerners are that good about the latter.
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I’m pretty sure that the article you read was essentially a press release for the author’s new book, “The Twilight of Human Rights Law.” I’d wager good money that some of your questions are addressed there.
One thing that I’d like to point out is that the formulation of the issue at hand in the book (which is how I found it) is slightly different. “*If* westerners bear a moral responsibility to help less well-off people living in other countries, then…”.
The truth of the matter is that issues of human rights matters are already vague in various ways, and here’s one of them: some human rights (education, health) are not just about legal status, but about maintaining a standard of living. It follows that if human rights are not to be just words on paper, someone needs to pay to maintain them. And who has enough money lying around to do that?
If human rights are truly universal, then the obligation to fulfill them is equally universal, whatever the cost.
So the argument isn’t “We have a duty to pay money to poor people in other countries.”, it’s “Either we have a duty to pay money to poor people in other countries, or this whole human rights thing we keep talking about so much is as good as birthday wishes.”
I don’t know what to say to that, but at least it’s an interesting problem.
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