Hurting but not harming the poor

My good friend Gijs van Donselaar pointed out to me that there is a way in which the rich West is hurting the poor without it being the case that they harm them. What is more, this type of hurting is also morally objectionable, but it is much harder to pin down the nature of the objection.

The idea is the following. Suppose you see a man drowning. You have all the skills to save him and it is not dangerous at all. However, before you enter the water to haul him out you propose a deal to him: I will save you if you give me your wallet, your car and your house. Note that this is a deal to mutual advantage. Both the drowning man and you will be better off as a result of this deal. (I assume that it is better to be alive without money, care and house, than it is to be dead). Furthermore, you haven't harmed the drowning man at all. It is not the case that you first pushed him into the water before making the proposal. Still, you should feel less than fully confident that there is nothing wrong with such a deal. The reason why you should lack such confidence, I believe, is that the deal seems totally disproportionate. The only reason why you can come to an agreement is that you are in a position of almost absolute bargaining power.

Now consider the poor factory workers in Cambodia working in factories that manufacture sneakers. Or consider the child laborers in places like Pakistan, Bangladesh and elsewhere. These people are in the same position as the drowning man: they prefer to work long hours in a crappy and dangerous job and have some salary over starvation. We in the West rely for a lot of the products we consume on cheap labor. It is easiest to get this in places like Cambodia, Pakistan and Bangladesh where there are a lot of desparate poor who are willing to trade their labor for the worst conditions possible and very little pay. Both the poor factory workers, the child laborers as well as we, the customers of the rich entrepreneurs who have exported their manufacture to the poor countries, benefit. So this is a situation of mutual advantage. Some knee-jerk globalists rejoice: 'look, everybody benefits!' And while it is certainly true that the poor Cambodians, Pakistani and Bangladeshi benefit (they would have starved otherwise), it is hard to see how this situation is morally (or otherwise) commendable. So even if it is not the case that the poor in the developing nations are poor because of the West, as Pogge argues (see my earlier post), we should pay decent wages, insist on good working conditions and supply things like schooling, healthcare and other services to the poor workers in those nations. To do anything less would be immoral -- in the same way as it is immoral to ask a drowning man for all his possessions in exchange for saving his life.